APPLIED PHYSICS LETTERS VOLUME 82, NUMBER 22 2 JUNE 2003

Pentacene-based radio-frequency identification circuitry

P. F. Baude,a) D. A. Ender, M. A. Haase, T. W. Kelley, D. V. Muyres, S. D. Theiss
3M Company, Electronics and Inorganic Technology Center, 201-1N-35, St. Paul, Minnesota 55144
共Received 20 February 2003; accepted 1 April 2003兲
Pentacene-based thin-film integrated circuits patterned only with polymeric shadow masks and
powered by near-field coupling at radio frequencies of 125 kHz and above 6 MHz have been
demonstrated. Sufficient amplitude modulation of the rf field was obtained to externally detect a
clock signal generated by the integrated circuit. The circuits operate without the use of a diode
rectification stage. This demonstration provides the basis for more sophisticated low-cost rf
transponder circuitry using organic semiconductors. © 2003 American Institute of Physics.
关DOI: 10.1063/1.1579554兴

Pentacene thin-film transistor 共TFT兲 circuits have been and aligned to the next shadow mask. Fiducial marks on each
investigated during the past decade with promising results mask provided a means to align the different layers to within
and exciting progress.1– 4 Field-effect mobilities have ⫾30 ␮ m. Fabrication began with 3 nm of titanium and 50
steadily increased as a result of gate dielectric surface nm of gold, which were vacuum evaporated through the first
treatments,5 improved pentacene deposition processes,3 and polymer shadow mask to serve as the bottom gate metal.
pentacene purification. Although a number of other organic Aluminum oxide was then electron-beam evaporated through
semiconductor materials have been used to prepare transis- a second shadow mask to provide a gate dielectric and an
tors and circuits,6 –9 pentacene continues to be an attractive interlayer dielectric with a specific capacitance of
material choice because of the relatively high mobilities. 250 pF/mm2 . A styrene-based polymeric surface treatment
A variety of applications have been proposed and, in was solution cast onto the gate dielectric to improve transis-
some cases, demonstrated, for organic-semiconductor cir- tor mobilities.19 Pentacene purchased from Aldrich, and pu-
cuits, including display backplanes,5,10,11 sensors,12 and rf rified using thermal gradient sublimation, was thermally
identification 共RFID兲 transponders 共tags兲.13 The work pre- evaporated at a rate of about 0.05 nm/s through a shadow
sented here is focused on RFID applications, although the mask. The pentacene film thickness was measured using
circuit powering scheme and patterning approach are appli- atomic force microscopy and found to be approximately 30
cable to display backplane circuitry and other applications. nm. Finally, 60 nm of gold was deposited through a shadow
Many different patterning techniques for organic- mask to form the source and drain electrodes of the transis-
semiconductor-based transistors and integrated circuits have tors and to complete metal connections throughout the cir-
been examined, including stamping,14 ink jet patterning,15 cuit.
cold-welding,16 and photolithography.17 Brody details the Transistors were characterized using a Hewlett Packard
shadow-mask patterning of inorganic-semiconductor-based 4145A semiconductor parameter analyzer. A representative
TFT circuits,18 wherein the layers are patterned using thin drain current versus gate voltage plot is shown in Fig. 2.
metal stencil masks. An advantage of shadow-mask pattern- Typical values for the effective mobility, extracted from the
ing is that, in principle, the masks can be placed and aligned
within the deposition system without breaking vacuum. We
have employed a polymeric shadow-mask patterning scheme
to fabricate organic-semiconductor-based integrated circuits.
Flexible shadow masks were fabricated in 25-␮m-thick Kap-
ton®, using excimer laser (␭⫽248 nm) ablation. This tech-
nique provides relatively rugged, large-area masks with a
current resolution capability of about 15 ␮m. We report here
a simple pentacene-based rf transponder circuit patterned
completely using these shadow masks. A photomicrograph of
the completed circuit is shown in Fig. 1. The inset shows a
close-up section of the ring-oscillator. The metal lines are
nominally 30 ␮m wide.
The circuits were formed on 2 in.⫻2 in. glass plates.
The substrate was nominally at room temperature during all
of the vacuum deposition steps. After each deposition, the
substrate was removed from the vacuum deposition chamber
FIG. 1. Shadow-masked circuit photomicrograph. The inset is a close-up
a兲
Author to whom correspondence should be addressed; electronic mail: showing one end of the ring-oscillator. The width of the image is approxi-
pfbaude@mmm.com mately 2.5 mm.

0003-6951/2003/82(22)/3964/3/$20.00 3964 © 2003 American Institute of Physics

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 Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 82, No. 22, 2 June 2003
FIG. 2. Drain current as a function of gate bias for pentacene TFT. W/L
⫽300 ␮ m/20 ␮ m. The drain–source potential was ⫺40 V.
square root of the drain current while in saturation, were
about 1.5 cm2 /V s. Typical values for threshold voltage, sub-
threshold slope, and on-off ratios were ⫺5 V, 2 V per de-
cade, and between 106 and 107 , respectively.
The integrated circuit shown in Fig. 1 is schematically
presented in Fig. 3, along with some of the external demodu-
lation circuitry. The circuit is comprised of a seven-stage
ring-oscillator and a five-stage output buffer. The gate length
for all the transistors was nominally 20 ␮m, and the gate
width for each of the ring-oscillator inverters was 60 ␮m and
300 ␮m for the load and driver transistors, respectively. The
oscillator, at 73 V dc power, had a propagation delay of 1.7
␮s.
The output buffer consists of an inverter equal in size to
the ring-oscillator inverters, followed by successively larger
inverters. The largest inverter has a drive transistor gate
width of about 6 mm, made using interdigitated source/drain
electrodes. Circuit simulations indicate that such an inverter
provides adequate load modulation 共amplitude modulation兲
of the rf carrier.
The circuit presented here uses the ac power from a
tuned antenna to directly power the logic circuitry, without
an intermediate rectification stage. This approach greatly
simplifies fabrication by eliminating the need for a rectifica-
tion stage, typically made using diodes or appropriately con-
figured transistors. Furthermore, using ac power allows for
FIG. 3. Circuit schematic showing TFT circuitry, reader and transponder
inductors 共Lp and Ls, respectively兲, resonant capacitor C, and demodulationcircuit and the external reader. The ring-oscillator frequency
instrumentation, including signal diode 1N4148.
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Baude et al. 3965
FIG. 4. Internal clock signal and externally demodulated rf, or reader, sig-
nal. The rf carrier signal is 125 kHz and tag voltage is approximately 30 V
rms.
much higher rf frequencies than would be practical for cir-
cuits using organic-semiconductor-based diodes in a rectifi-
cation stage. During the forward biased cycle of the ac power
共wherein a negative voltage is applied to the drain of the load
TFT兲, the logic circuitry operates as expected. During the
reverse bias portion, the load transistor is turned off, and the
inverter output is either floating or driven towards ground in
the case of a logic 0 or logic 1 input, respectively. The circuit
also benefits from a relatively large logic gate input capaci-
tances to filter out the rf and to maintain the output signal. A
detailed discussion of this powering scheme is in preparation
for a later publication.
The clock signal propagates through the series of invert-
ers and drives the final large inverter, in turn modulating the
rf absorption as it is turned off and on. This circuit was
originally designed to operate with dc power 共with an or-
ganic diode rectifier兲 and could be modified for optimal per-
formance when driven with ac power.
A variety of inductor values were used in the tuned tran-
sponder antenna, ranging from 28 ␮H to 1.78 mH with an
external capacitor selected to resonate at the desired fre-
quency. For the largest inductance, the typical rms voltages
provided by the antenna were on the order of 30 V at a read
distance of about 3 cm.
The reader uses a circular two-turn antenna, approxi-
mately 3 inches in diameter, with an inductance of about 1.5
␮H. The detection circuit consists of a 1N4148 signal diode
coupled into a Stanford Research SR560 pre-amplifier for
filtering and amplification, as shown in Fig. 3. The filter
attenuation on the SR560 is ⫺12 dB/octave and the high-
pass band was set at 100 Hz. Figure 4 shows the ring-
oscillator signal 共measured directly兲, and the resulting de-
modulated rf signal measured by the reader, demonstrating
the communication between the pentacene based transponder
is approximately 200 Hz and varies with the input rf voltage.
 3966 Appl. Phys. Lett., Vol. 82, No. 22, 2 June 2003
5
Higher rf frequencies were explored and we found we were
able to obtain detectable load modulation with frequencies
6
up to about 6.5 MHz. The upper limit of the practical rf
frequency is determined, in part, by the mobility of the tran- 7
sistors, drive voltage, and channel length.
8
In summary, we have demonstrated pentacene based
thin-film integrated RFID circuits patterned with polymer 9
shadow masks. The circuits were powered directly with rf,
10
without a rectification stage, and shown to operate at 125
kHz and as high as 6.5 MHz.
11
The authors thank J. Thomas and R. Jesme for invalu- 12
able discussions. We are grateful to P. Fleming for expertise
13
and assistance with the shadow-mask fabrication.
14
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