Computing

Higher-Performance Plastic Electronics

(Page 2 of 2)

  • Tuesday, May 26, 2009
  • By Katherine Bourzac

Bao makes this layer by spin-coating a film of a polymer made up of the insulator silane trailed by a long hydrophobic carbon tail. "It self-assembles, and after cleaning and treating, you end up with a single layer that's highly ordered," says Bao. Her group then deposited several organic semiconductors on top of these surfaces and found that they also grew in regular, smooth layers. "On a disordered surface, they grow like islands instead of planes," leaving holes that impede electron flow, she says. What makes her method work so well, she explains, is the structure of the molecules in the insulating layer. "We think that by having very densely packed hydrophobic tails on the surface, we lowered the barrier to semiconductor assembly."

The Stanford researchers then tested the performance of these devices. When pentacene, one of the most commonly used organic semiconductors, is deposited on the new surface instead of on a conventional one, its ability to carry an electrical charge jumps up by two orders of magnitude. Other semiconductors that Bao's group tested showed similar performance gains."People would kill for a twofold improvement in performance, let alone tenfold," says Hagen Klauk, head of the organic electronics group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany. More importantly, he points out, Bao "can make a really good self-assembled layer every time."

Such consistency is vital, agrees Do Hwan Kim, a researcher in the display-device group at the Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology in South Korea. "For the application of organic semiconductors into the commercial display market, it is crucial to obtain reproducibility and reliability," he says.

Bao says her technique is simple and should be scalable to large areas and applicable to other stubstrates, although the Stanford researchers haven't yet made the devices on flexible backings. Now Bao's method must be proven on a large scale.

Print

Related Articles

Biodegradable Transistors

Electronics that break down in the body could be useful in temporary medical implants and drug delivery.

Etching Out Organic Displays

Company will sell materials for making organic electronics using silicon manufacturing infrastructure.

Ultra-Efficient Organic LEDs

OLEDs could soon give fluorescent lighting a run for its money.

To comment, please sign in or register

Forgot my password

Advertisement

MAGAZINE

Can We Build Tomorrow's Breakthroughs?

Manufacturing in the United States is in trouble. That's bad news not just for the country's economy but for the future of innovation.

Sponsored Content

Technologies from National Instruments

Adding Data Logging
Log measured data to a file and open it in Microsoft Excel

> Click here for more National Instruments Videos <
Whitepaper

Temperature Measurements with Thermocouples: How-To Guide

This document is part of the “How-To Guide for Most Common Measurements” centralized resource portal. This tutorial provides a detailed guide for measurement and device considerations to take temperature measurements using thermocouples. Get an introduction to thermocouples, which are inexpensive sensing devices widely used with PC-based data acquisition systems. Also review some specific thermocouple examples and learn how thermocouples work and ways to integrate them into a data acquisition measurement system.

View full PDF > Listen to story >
Find us on Youtube

Videos

A Robot Recruit that Can Do It All

More

Advertisement

Technology Review Lists

TR50

Our list of the 50 most innovative companies, including the following:

Geron

Ushahidi

BrightSource Energy

Netflix

More

Advertisement

Facebook

Advertisement