Plastic Chips: New Semiconducting Polymers Fabricated

Plastic Chips: New materials boost organic electronics
Alexandra Goho

Over the past decade, research groups in academia and industry have been racing to fabricate electronic devices?-integrated circuits, displays for handheld computers, and solar cells?-not from silicon but from semiconducting polymers (SN: 5/17/03, p. 312: Available to subscribers at http://www.sciencenews.org/20030517/bob9.asp). Components made from such organic materials could be flexible, as well as cheaper and easier to manufacture than their silicon counterparts.

Now researchers at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J., have devised a new class of organic semiconductor materials that could hasten the arrival of what could be the electronics revolution's next big wave.


Until recently, the fabrication of plastic electronics has been limited by the number of molecular building blocks suitable for making semiconducting polymers. Transistors?-which are the switches in an integrated circuit?-require two types of semiconductor materials: n-type and p-type. In n-type materials, charge flows through the material via electrons. P-type materials transport charge through "holes," places where electrons are missing...

...The pantry of organic materials for making n-type semiconductors has been particularly sparse, says Ananth Dodabalapur of the University of Texas at Austin. "This will be very useful for people like myself who make organic circuits." One of the biggest appeals of plastic electronics is that manufacturers could spray liquid polymer circuits onto a surface using ink-jet printers, instead of resorting to the multibillion-dollar fabrication equipment used to etch circuitry on silicon wafers.

Marks predicts that low-cost, even disposable plastic electronic devices, such as smart cards, electronic tags for tracking inventory, and chemical sensors, will emerge in the next couple of years.


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Science News: Semiconducting Polymers