| Organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs) offer a great deal of promise for applications in chemical and biological sensing where there is a demand for small, portable, and inexpensive sensors. OTFTs have many advantages over other types of sensors, including low-cost fabrication, straightforward miniaturization, simple instrumentation, and inherent signal amplification. This dissertation examines two distinct types of OTFTs: organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) based on pentacene, and organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) based on poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):poly(styrene sulfonate) (PEDOT:PSS).; The bulk of the previous work on sensing with OFETs has focused on gas sensing, and this dissertation contributes to this body of work by briefly treating the large, reversible response of pentacene OFETs to humidity. However, there are many applications where the analyte of interest must be detected in an aqueous environment rather than a gaseous environment, and very little work has been done in this area for OFETs. Therefore, the integration of pentacene OFETs with microfluidics is treated in detail. Using poly(dimethylsiloxane) (PDMS) microfluidic channels to confine aqueous solutions over the active region of pentacene transistors, it is demonstrated that the current-voltage characteristics remain stable under aqueous flow with a decrease in mobility of ∼30% compared to its value when dry.; The operation of PEDOT:PSS transistors is also treated in detail. It is demonstrated that their transistor behavior cannot be attributed solely to a field effect and that ion motion is key to the switching mechanism. It is also demonstrated that simple glucose sensors based on PEDOT:PSS OECTs are sensitive to low glucose concentrations below 1 mM, therefore showing promise for potential application in the field of noninvasive glucose monitoring for diabetic patients using saliva rather than blood samples. Furthermore, a novel microfluidic gating technique has been developed to integrate PEDOT:PSS OECTs with microfluidics. This technique converts conventional passive microfluidic channels into electrically active device components, which may also prove useful for other applications within the growing field of microfluidic devices.; Finally, initial results for self-assembled monolayer field-effect transistors (SAMFETs) are presented. These devices offer both an elegant approach to OTFT sensing and a convenient platform for studying the basic transistor physics of OTFTs. |
