From polymer transistors toward printed electronics
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Printed organic circuits have the potential to revolutionize the spread of electronic applications. This will be enabled by inexpensive and fast fabrication with printing techniques using soluble organic materials. Two main challenges have to be mastered on the way towards printed electronics. First, the development of stable transistors and an adapted chip design for organic materials, and second, the development of a reliable fabrication process. We present our results on high performance polymer transistors, mainly based on poly-3alkylthiophene (P3AT) as semiconducting material. Fast circuits up to 200 kHz and stable circuits with operation lifetimes of more than 1000 h under ambient conditions without any encapsulation are shown. We also report on a fully printed, all organic ring oscillator.
I. INTRODUCTION
Organic semiconductors and conductors, the inventors of which have been honored with the Nobel Prize in 2000,1–3 open completely new prospects for microelectronics. Today silicon as semiconducting material is used in nearly all electronic products. This has been initiated by the invention of the semiconducting transistor in 1947. The success of microelectronics after all is based on the ingenuous handling of semiconducting crystals, above all silicon. Apart from silicon, there are only few semiconducting materials which also have attained an economic importance, such as gallium arsenide (GaAs) in optoelectronic elements. Now, with the availability of organic semiconductors and conductors, completely new setups, productions processes and applications can be realized. This will bring electronics even closer to nearly every product, as they can be produced as thin film on polymer substrates and applied on packages. For the production process organic semiconductors and conductors have enormous advantages, as many of them can be processed in solution, i.e. liquid, and do not have to be available as crystals of high purity. Hence organic electronics can be made by printing, which allows high volume, low-cost applications. Certainly, the charge carriers move considerably slower through organic semiconductors than through silicon, and therefore organic circuits are considerably slower, too. Aside from the already existing organic light-emitting diodes and the reversion of the effect in organic photo-voltaic cells, polymer chips made of
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Address all correspondence to this author. e-mail: [email protected] DOI: 10.1557/JMR.2004.0263 J. Mater. Res., Vol. 19, No. 7, Jul 2004
organic transistors have a great potential for new products, the extent of which is not yet foreseen. This includes not only electronic radio frequency identification (RFID) labels, substituting the optical bar code as it is known on nearly every consumer good today; but also other applications such as single-use electronics, lowcost sensors, or memories and flexible displays. Thus, printed polymer electronics might revolutionize the availability of electronics, to bring it to applications where there are no electronics today. The
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