Symmetric Ambipolar Thin-Film Transistors and High-Gain CMOS-like Inverters Using Environmentally Friendly Copper Nitride

Oxide semiconductor thin-film transistors (TFTs) are currently used as the fundamental building blocks in commercial flat-panel displays because of the excellent performance of n-channel TFTs. However, except for a few materials, their p-channel performances have not been acceptable. Although some p-type oxide semiconductors exhibit superior hole transport properties, their TFT performances are greatly deteriorated, which is a major obstacle in the development of complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor (CMOS) circuits. Herein, an ionic nitride semiconductor, copper nitride (Cu 3 N), composed of environmentally benign elements is shown to exhibit highly symmetric hole and electron transport, indicating its suitability for application in CMOS circuits. We performed a two-step investigation. The first step was to examine the ultimate potential of Cu 3 N using an electric-double-layer transistor structure with epitaxial Cu 3 N channels measured at 220 K, which exhibited ambipolar operation with hole and electron mobilities of ∼5 and ∼10 cm 2 V –1 s –1, respectively, and a high on/off ratio of ∼10 5 . The second step is to demonstrate the feasibility of TFT circuits with a polycrystalline channel on non-single-crystal (SiO 2 /Si) substrates. CMOS-like inverters composed of two polycrystalline Cu 3 N ambipolar TFTs on a SiO 2 /Si substrate exhibited a high voltage gain of ∼100.