Pseudo-CMOS: A Novel Design Style for Flexible Electronics

Flexible electronics have attracted much attention since they enable promising applications such as low-cost RFID tags and e-paper. Thin-film transistors (TFTs) are considered as an ideal candidate to imple-ment flexible electronics on low-cost substrates. Most TFT technologies, however, have only mono-type – either n- or p-type – devices and thus modern design technologies for silicon-based electronics cannot be directly applied. In this paper, we propose a novel design style Pseudo-CMOS for flexible electronics that uses only mono-type TFTs while achieving comparable performance with the complementary-type designs. The manufacturing cost and complexity can therefore be significantly reduced while the circuit yield and relia-bility are also enhanced with the built-in capability of post-fabrication tuning. Some standard cells have been designed and fabricated in p-type organic and n-type InGaZnO (IGZO) TFT technologies which successfully verify the superiority of the proposed Pseudo-CMOS design style. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first design solution that has proven superior perfor-mance for both types of TFT technologies. 1