Organic FETs (OFETs) are essential devices in future flexible electronics. Yet, a crucial issue associated with electronic contact is still unsolved and our fundamental understanding remains very limited. Unlike many other previous reports talking about the contact resistance, in this paper, we specifically discuss its major root: the Schottky barrier, by comparison of the conventional metal-silicon contacts, and the unconventional metal-organic contacts, where the special features in OFETs are underlined. We not only examine the basics of the Schottky barrier but also the extrinsic effects as well as the characterization methods. The key factors in device fabrication are also reviewed in order to minimize the detrimental impacts of the Schottky barrier for obtaining optimum device performance.

Understanding spinterfaces between magnetic metals and organic semiconductors is essential to unlock the great potentials that organic materials host for spintronic applications. Although plenty of efforts have been devoted to studying organic spintronic devices, exploring the role of metal/molecule spinterfaces at two-dimensional limit remains challenging because of excessive disorders and traps at the interfaces. Here, we demonstrate atomically smooth metal/molecule interfaces through nondestructively transferring magnetic electrodes on epitaxial grown single-crystalline layered organic films. Using such high-quality interfaces, we investigate spin injection of spin-valve devices based on organic films of different layers, in which molecules are packed in different manners. We find that the measured magnetoresistance and the estimated spin polarization increase markedly for bilayer devices compared with their monolayer counterparts. These observations reveal the key role of molecular packing on spin polarization, which is supported by density functional theory calculations. Our findings provide promising routes toward designing spinterfaces for organic spintronic devices.

An important development in modern electronics is the realization of band-structure engineering for the design of novel materials and devices. One possible way to realize band-structure engineering is by addition of periodic potentials to two-dimensional (2D) materials, such as graphene, to form a superstructure, known as a “superlattice.’ Unlike the band gap of graphene, the band gap of silicene can be tuned by an out-of-plane electric field owing to its unusual buckled structure. In this work, we use the designable band gap of silicene and the band structure of superlattices, together with the spin and valley degrees of freedom, to propose a design principle for optimizing the performance of spin- and valley-dependent negative-differential-resistance (NDR) devices using silicene superlattices. On the basis of the effective Hamiltonian formalism, we predict that the peak-to-valley current ratio could be larger than most recently reported results achieved by 2D materials, suggesting that the silicene superlattice is a good candidate for realizing NDR devices. The design principle proposed in this work could also be extended to other layered materials with tunable band gaps. This could pave the way for advanced material and device designs based on band-gap engineering of 2D materials.