Researchers double organic semiconductor conductivity

The ‘straining’ process essentially involves packing the molecules closer together as the semiconductor crystals form — a technique currently used in silicon electronics, which has so far proved difficult in organics.

Wide-scale adoption of organic electronics is hoped to lead to devices that are cheaper, lighter, more robust and more flexible compared with their silicon counterparts.

However, it is believed they can never compete with silicon in terms of performance because the organic materials fundamentally limit the mobility of electrons and thus the speed of operation.

Nevertheless, it may be possible to considerably speed up their action through fabrication modifications such as straining.

‘Strained lattices are no secret. We’ve known about their favourable electrical properties for decades and they are in use in today’s silicon computer chips, but no one has been successful in creating a stable strained lattice organic semiconductor with a very short distance between molecules, until now,’ said project lead Prof Zhenan Bao of Stanford University.