It might look like there's not much to it, but you're looking the world's fastest thin-film organic transistor—and it could revolutionize the displays we spend our days looking at.
Its the result of an ongoing quest to use cheap, carbon-rich molecules and plastics to create organic semiconductors that can compete with their silicon-based counterparts. Now, researchers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Stanford University have created organic transistors that are over five times faster than those produced in the past.
They achieved that by tweaking standard organic semiconductor production techniques. Usually, they're made by depositing carbon-rich molecules and a complementary plastic, in solution, onto a spinning platter to deposit a very thin coating. In this new work, they span the platter way faster and only coated a small region.
The result was a denser concentration of organic molecules in a more regular alignment, allowing electrical charges to pass through far more quickly. Five times more quickly. Dubbed "off-center spin coating" and published in Nature Communications, the new technique could lead to inexpensive, high-performance electronics built on transparent substrates. And that could make for some pretty exciting screen technology, with huge sheets of electronics that are transparent to the naked eye. [Nature Communications via The Engineer]