Organic electronic devices

This research is aimed at the development of electronic devices based on organic semiconductors. Though far from the performances reached by silicon and inorganic crystalline semiconductors, especially in terms of switching speed and limited area, these devices are beginning to attract an ever increasing attention for a large variety of application that requires material characteristics not affordable for silicon and inorganic crystals, namely large area and flexible substrate devices.

An industrial application example of this new technology is Electronic Paper; soon, everybody could have a really portable pc endowed with en enrollable, light screen.

In our lab, we have recently realized an example of field effect device which is really flexible. In the following picture you can see a device realized on a thin film of poly-ethilen-tereftalate (PET), the same material that is used for water bottles and, in thin pellicules only a little bit thicker than that in the photograph, for wrapping food.It is completely transparent and perfectly insulating. For these reasons, it has been employed as the insulating layer of a FET structure, whose other elements are source, drain and gate metal contacts (the only visible in the picture) and finally the organic semiconductor channel.

Fig.1 Two OFET structures (source and drain contacts) realized on a PET thin film

Measurements
Measurements from the devices show very good performances with respects to current state-of-the-art realizations in this field.