Low-Power/High-Gain Flexible Complementary Circuits Based on Printed Organic Electrochemical Transistors

Journal article, 2022

The ability to accurately extract low-amplitude voltage signals is crucial in several fields, ranging from single-use diagnostics and medical technology to robotics and the Internet of Things (IoT). The organic electrochemical transistor (OECT), which features large transconductance values at low operating voltages, is ideal for monitoring small signals. Here, low-power and high-gain flexible circuits based on printed complementary OECTs are reported. This work leverages the low threshold voltage of both p-type and n-type enhancement-mode OECTs to develop complementary voltage amplifiers that can sense voltages as low as 100 µV, with gains of 30.4 dB and at a power consumption of 0.1–2.7 µW (single-stage amplifier). At the optimal operating conditions, the voltage gain normalized to power consumption reaches 169 dB µW−1, which is >50 times larger than state-of-the-art OECT-based amplifiers. In a monolithically integrated two-stage configuration, these complementary voltage amplifiers reach voltage gains of 193 V/V, which are among the highest for emerging complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor-like technologies operating at supply voltages below 1 V. These flexible complementary circuits based on printed OECTs define a new power-efficient platform for sensing and amplifying low-amplitude voltage signals in several emerging beyond-silicon applications.