Organic lateral trench devices fabricated by trench technology

Organic semiconductors are considered as attractive materials for spintronic applications. One of the current challenges in this field resides in the cost-effective fabrication of devices with laterally stacked electrodes and their integration at the wafer level. In this work lateral devices with electrodes separated by sub-100 nm gaps were fabricated using conventional UV lithography combined with semiconductor processing. Following a metallization step for the preparation of Au or Co electrodes, organic films were evaporated in high vacuum. Typically an average film thickness of 350 nm was required to form a nanomembrane that closes the gap between the electrodes. These structures allow the systematic investigation of electric and magnetoresistive properties of diamagnetic and paramagnetic organic semiconductor materials (in this case Alq3 and cobalt phthalocyanine) as a function of the width of the electrode gap. These devices are intended to be used in magnetoresistive devices and molecular spintronics.