Fabrication of Wearable Transistor with All-Graphene Electrodes via Hot Pressing

Polymers (Basel). 2022 Jun 27;14(13):2602. doi: 10.3390/polym14132602.

Abstract

Textile electronics are ideal for novel electronic devices owing to their flexibility, light weight, and wearability. In this work, wearable organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) with all-graphene electrodes, fabricated using hot pressing, are described. First, highly conductive and flexible electrodes consisting of a cotton textile substrate and electrochemically exfoliated graphene (EEG) were prepared via hot pressing. The EEG/textile electrodes exhibited a low sheet resistance of 1.3 Ω sq-1 and high flexibility; these were used as gate electrodes in the wearable OFETs. In addition, spray-coated EEG was also used as the source/drain (S/D) electrodes of the wearable OFETs, which recorded a sheet resistance of 14.8 Ω sq-1 after hot pressing. The wearable OFETs exhibited stable electrical performance, a field-effect mobility of 13.8 cm2 V-1 s-1, and an on-off current ratio of ~103 during 1000 cycles of bending. Consequently, the fabrication method for wearable transistors developed using textiles and hot-pressed graphene electrodes has potential applications in next-generation wearable devices.

Keywords: electrode; graphene; hot pressing; textile; transistor.