The Effect of Thermal Annealing Process on Fermi-level Pinning Phenomenon in Metal-Pentacene Junctions

Recently, organic thin-film transistors have been widely researched for organic light-emitting diode panels, memory devices, logic circuits for flexible display because of its virtue of mechanical flexibility, low fabrication cost, low process temperature, and large area production. In order to achieve high performance OTFTs, increase in accumulation carrier mobility is a critical factor. Post-fabrication thermal annealing process has been known as one of the methods to achieve this by improving the crystal quality of organic semiconductor materials In this paper, we researched the properties of pentacene films with X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) analyses as different annealing temperature in N2 ambient. Electrical characterization of the pentacene based thin film transistor was also conducted by transfer length method (TLM) with different annealing temperature in Al- and Ti-pentacene junctions to confirm the Fermi level pinning phenomenon. For Al- and Ti-pentacene junctions, is was found that as the surface quality of the pentacene films changed as annealing temperature increased, the hole-barrier height (h-BH) that were controlled by Fermi level pinning were effectively reduced.