Printable Organic Dual-Base Transistors Offer High Performance, Low Power Draw, and Flexibility

The Organic Devices and Systems (ODS) group at Technische Universität Dresden has announced a breakthrough in transistor production: The development of organic printable transistors which could lead to low-cost rollable displays and other flexible electronics.

"Up to now, vertical organic transistors have been seen as lab curiosities which were thought too difficult to be integrated in an electronic circuit," explains Dr. Hans Kleemann of his team's breakthrough. "However, as shown in our publication, vertical organic transistors with two independent control electrodes are perfectly suited to realize complex logic circuits while keeping the main benefit of vertical transistor devices, namely the high switching frequency."

The team's creation is a vertical organic permeable dual-base transistor, which can be tuned for threshold voltages and on-current requirements, based on "a simple sandwich-like architecture." They offer, the researchers claim, a high-speed switching frequency measured in the nanoseconds and thanks to their adjustable threshold voltage offer high signal integrity and low power consumption — and single transistors can even be used to represent different logical states including AND, NOT, and NAND.

Because the transistors are printable on flexible substrates, the team believes they could be used in high-definition roll-up displays for portable televisions and foldable smartphones, or for low-power-consumption tasks like radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags.

The team's work has been published under open-access terms in the journal Nature Communications.