CHAPTER 13: Ambipolar Transistors for Logic Operation

Ambipolar transistors are a type of transistor where both electrons and holes can be transported within the semiconductor layer depending on the applied gate bias. Due to their potential applications in bipolar memories and logic circuits, great effort has been devoted to materials synthesis and construction of novel device configurations in the past a few years. In this chapter, we first give a brief introduction to unipolar transistors, including their working principles and important parameters used to estimate device performance. Then, we introduce the working principles of organic ambipolar transistors, with the ambipolar transistors divided into three types according to the type of semiconductor used. Recent examples and working mechanisms for these three kinds of ambipolar transistors and logic circuits based on them are then introduced and discussed. Additionally, we introduce ambipolar transistors based on two-dimensional semiconductors. We have also included a table to summarize and compare the performance of many reported ambipolar transistors and logic circuits based on them, before providing some concluding remarks.