Organic complementary circuitry combines all the
advantages of plastic electronics, such as flexibility, thinness and
solution-processability with low power consumption. Here we
report organic complimentary inverters fabricated in a carrierfree
batch process on plastic foil with dielectric and
semiconductor layers patterned using the high-volume gravure
contact printing technique. The transistor components have
bottom-gate, bottom-contact configuration with aluminium gates
and gold contacts, allowing full use of photolithographic
processing whilst protecting the semiconductors by depositing
them last. Cross-linkable polymer dielectric, p-type small
molecule and the n-type polymer semiconductors are printed
from inks based on non-chlorinated solvents. Printing instability
is observed for capillary numbers approaching 1. The 430 nm
thick dielectric affords relatively-low operational voltage and it is
the thinnest printed organic dielectric reported in the literature
for organic inverters to date. Both p- and n-type transistors have
a mobility of 0.01–0.04 cm2V
1
s
1
. The device parameters for the
n-type transistors show less variation than the p-type transistors,
which can be related to the more isotropic charge transport in
polymer films compared to the small-molecule polycrystalline
films. The resultant inverters have an average gain of 4.5±1.5
and a maximum gain of 8 at VDD = 20 V. The combination of
conventional photolithographic processing and gravure contact
printing can therefore be used to fabricate bottom-gate organic
complementary circuitry on plastic