Design and Analysis of Enhanced Strain Tolerance in Organic Thin Film Transistors with Hybrid Al2O3/PVP Dielectrics for Flexible Electronics

Publications

Design and Analysis of Enhanced Strain Tolerance in Organic Thin Film Transistors with Hybrid Al2O3/PVP Dielectrics for Flexible Electronics

Year : 2025

Publisher : Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers

Source Title : IEEE Journal on Flexible Electronics

Document Type :

Abstract

Flexible and wearable electronics demand transistor technologies that can sustain stable performance under extreme mechanical deformation. In this work, we propose a quantitative benchmarking framework for strain resilience in organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs), introducing three normalized metrics: the Degradation Factor (DF), quantifying drain-current loss under strain; the Mobility Factor (MF), representing the rate of charge-transport degradation per unit strain; and the Strain-Stability Window (SSW), defining the maximum strain range within which devices remain in the safe operating zone (DF < 15%). Using Silvaco Victory TCAD, we systematically investigate the strain-dependent behaviour of single-dielectric (Al2O3) and hybrid-dielectric (Al2O3/PVP) OTFTs under both compressive (concave) and tensile (convex) bending with radii from 8 μm to 1 μm. Results show that hybrid dielectric OTFTs exhibit superior strain tolerance, with a degradation factor of only 9% under 9.85% tensile strain, compared to 25% for single-dielectric devices. Furthermore, hybrid devices show a markedly lower mobility factor (-3 %/strain compressive, -1.9 %/strain tensile) compared with single-dielectric OTFTs (-6 %/strain compressive, -5 %/strain tensile). Beyond confirming the mechanical advantages of hybrid dielectrics, our study demonstrates that strain-stability quantifiers provide a universal method to benchmark flexible OTFT reliability, bridging device physics with practical requirements of wearable bioelectronics. These findings establish hybrid Al2O3/PVP dielectrics not only as performance enhancers but also as reliable design enablers for next-generation strain-resilient organic electronics.