Polyelectrolyte-gated organic complementary circuits operating at low power and voltage
During the last decade, printed organic electronics has evolved to become a platform with great promise for a vast array of novel applications within the areas of printed intelligence, large area electronics and internet-of-things. Here, material science has proven crucial in order to improve performance of individual devices as well as of complete electronic systems, and to make electronics possible to manufacture using printing technologies. In many of the targeted applications for organic electronics, powering will be achieved using energy harvesting devices, such as solar cells and thermoelectric generators, and also using printed batteries and electromagnetic induction. This requires development of robust transistor circuits for digital and analogue signal processing that can operate at ultralow power and voltage. Within the EU integrated project ONE-P, the group of Professors Magnus Berggren and Xavier Crispin from Linköping University (Sweden), together with Merck Chemicals and BASF, report complementary organic circuits built up from combinations of p- and n-channel polymer semiconductors and n- and p-type polyelectrolyte gate insulators. This particular choice of gate insulators ensures field-effect operation and allows for high charge carrier densities in the semiconductors already at very low voltages. They present air-stable circuits operating at voltages down to 0.2 V, with signal delays down to 260 µs, and with a static power consumption of less than 2.5 nW per logic gate. To get an idea of how small that last value is, an ordinary alkaline AAA battery has the capacity of supplying that power for 55,000 years. Those findings are now reported in Advanced Materials. More info: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/adma.201101757/abstract
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