Organic Electronics
Over the past 20 years, there has been great progress in the development and fundamental understanding of organic thin-film transistors (OTFTs). But there are many fundamental problems yet to be addressed to gain the mechanistic understanding of the issues and origins related to reliability of OTFTs. The primary motivation for organic devices has been the vision of low-cost electronics based on ink-jet or other printing processes for applications such as radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, flexible displays and sensors. The chemical, physical and electrical properties of numerous organic semiconductors, organic gate dielectrics and contact materials have been studied in great detail. Pentacene-based OTFTs are the leading contender as they have exhibited channel mobility (~1 cm2V-1s-1) rivaling those of common inorganic semiconductors (amorphous silicon) currently used for these applications.
This value for mobility is likely near the fundamental limit of mobility for organic crystals as determined using time-of-flight measurements (1 to 10 cm2V-1s-1). The evolution of maximum mobility values reported as a function of time for the most common organic semiconductors has saturated. One of the major fundamental issues with OTFTs is that of degradation due to the environment or bias stress. Therefore, one primary interest in organic electronics is the understanding of fundamental mechanisms related to stability and reliability of organic semiconductors. The second interest is to dramatically improve the performance of organics through combination with nanoscale materials (particles, wires).