Team develops ‘world’s fastest’ thin-film organic transistor

Engineers have been trying to use inexpensive, carbon-rich molecules and plastics to create organic semiconductors capable of performing electronic operations at speeds comparable to costlier silicon-based technologies.

In the January 8 edition of Nature Communications, engineers from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) and Stanford University show how they created thin-film organic transistors that could operate more than five times faster than previous examples of this experimental technology.

Research teams led by Zhenan Bao, professor of chemical engineering at Stanford, and Jinsong Huang, assistant professor of mechanical and materials engineering at UNL used their new process to make organic thin-film transistors with electronic characteristics comparable to those found in expensive, curved-screen television displays based on a form of silicon technology.

They are said to have achieved their results by altering the basic process for making thin film organic transistors. Typically, researchers drop a solution, containing carbon-rich molecules and a complementary plastic, onto a spinning platter. The spinning action deposits a thin coating of the materials over the glass platter used in this research.