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Printed electrolyte-gated oxide electronics is an emerging electronic technology in the low voltage regime (≤1 V). Whereas in the past mainly dielectrics have been used for gating the transistors, many recent approaches employ the advantages of solution processable, solid polymer electrolytes, or ion gels that provide high gate capacitances produced by a Helmholtz double layer, allowing for low-voltage operation. Herein, with special focus on work performed at KIT recent advances in building electronic circuits based on indium oxide, n-type electrolyte-gated field-effect transistors (EGFETs) are reviewed. When integrated into ring oscillator circuits a digital performance ranging from 250 Hz at 1 V up to 1 kHz is achieved. Sequential circuits such as memory cells are also demonstrated. More complex circuits are feasible but remain challenging also because of the high variability of the printed devices. However, the device inherent variability can be even exploited in security circuits such as physically unclonable functions (PUFs), which output a reliable and unique, device specific, digital response signal. As an overall advantage of the technology all the presented circuits can operate at very low supply voltages (0.6 V), which is crucial for low-power printed electronics applications.
Electrolyte-gated transistors (EGTs) represent an interesting alternative to conventional dielectric-gating to reduce the required high supply voltage for printed electronic applications. Here, a type of ink-jet printable ion-gel is introduced and optimized to fabricate a chemically crosslinked ion-gel by self-assembled gelation, without additional crosslinking processes, e.g., UV-curing. For the self-assembled gelation, poly(vinyl alcohol) and poly(ethylene-alt-maleic anhydride) are used as the polymer backbone and chemical crosslinker, respectively, and 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoromethanesulfonate ([EMIM][OTf]) is utilized as an ionic species to ensure ionic conductivity. The as-synthesized ion-gel exhibits an ionic conductivity of ≈5 mS cm−1 and an effective capacitance of 5.4 µF cm−2 at 1 Hz. The ion-gel is successfully employed in EGTs with an indium oxide (In2O3) channel, which shows on/off-ratios of up to 1.3 × 106 and a subthreshold swing of 80.62 mV dec−1.