Printed thin film transistors and CMOS inverters based on semiconducting carbon nanotube ink purified by a nonlinear conjugated copolymerElectronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c6nr00015k

Two innovative research studies are reported in this paper. One is the sorting of semiconducting carbon nanotubes and ink formulation by a novel semiconductor copolymer and second is the development of CMOS inverters using not the p-type and n-type transistors but a printed p-type transistor and a printed ambipolar transistor. A new semiconducting copolymer (named P-DPPb5T ) was designed and synthesized with a special nonlinear structure and more condensed conjugation surfaces, which can separate large diameter semiconducting single-walled carbon nanotubes (sc-SWCNTs) from arc discharge SWCNTs according to their chiralities with high selectivity. With the sorted sc-SWCNTs ink, thin film transistors (TFTs) have been fabricated by aerosol jet printing. The TFTs displayed good uniformity, low operating voltage (±2 V) and subthreshold swing (SS) (122-161 mV dec −1 ), high effective mobility (up to 17.6-37.7 cm 2 V −1 s −1 ) and high on/off ratio (10 4 -10 7 ). With the printed TFTs, a CMOS inverter was constructed, which is based on the p-type TFT and ambipolar TFT instead of the conventional p-type and n-type TFTs. Compared with other recently reported inverters fabricated by printing, the printed CMOS inverters demonstrated a better noise margin (74% 1/2 V dd ) and was hysteresis free. The inverter has a voltage gain of up to 16 at an applied voltage of only 1 V and low static power consumption. The printed CMOS inverters showed excellent electrical properties with almost hysteresis free, high voltage gain and large noise margin at low supply voltage only 1.25 V.