Flexible Low-Voltage Thin-Film Transistors for Logic Circuits and Neuromorphic Computing Applications

Flexible thin-film transistors (TFTs) operating at low voltage are key building blocks for next-generation wearable electronics and brain-inspired systems, yet simultaneously achieving low-voltage operation, environmental robustness and multifunctionality remains a great challenge. In this work, flexible indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) TFTs based on a solution-processed nanocomposite gate dielectric were fabricated, in which the introduced nanofiller effectively enhanced the capacitance, mechanical strength and moisture resistance of the polymer dielectric. The resulting devices exhibit an on/off ratio over 106 and can be fully turned on at a gate voltage below 1 V. After 2000 bending cycles, 90-day ambient aging and 3600 s continuous gate-bias stress, the threshold voltage and subthreshold swing show only slight drifts and the on/off ratio remains above 106, demonstrating outstanding mechanical durability, anti-aging capability and bias stability. On this basis, a logic inverter was constructed, which delivers a peak voltage gain of ~9 at a supply voltage of 2.5 V and realizes stable dynamic inversion for low-frequency square-wave signals. Owing to the tunable ion migration and electric double-layer polarization of the gate dielectric, the TFTs emulate typical biological synaptic behaviors, including pulse-dependent potentiation, long-term potentiation (LTP) and long-term depression (LTD). Neural network simulations based on device conductance states achieve accuracy of ~90% on the MNIST handwritten digit dataset and 88.1% on the challenging Stanford Cars vehicle dataset. This work verifies that the developed flexible TFTs possess dual functions of logic operation and neuromorphic computing, providing a feasible solution for the development of high-performance flexible low-power electronic devices and brain-inspired vision systems.