Stacking Turns Organic Transistors Up Vertical integration opens door to wearables, body interfaces, and brain-mimicking tech
Published in Tech News.
The vertical electrochemical transistor is based on a new kind of electronic polymer and a vertical, instead of planar, architecture.
Organic electronics appear to be, as the name might imply, quite good at interacting with a biological body and brain. Now scientists have created record-breaking, high-performance organic electronic devices using a potentially cheap, easy, and scalable approach that adopts a vertical architecture instead of a flat one, according to a new study.
Modern electronics rely on transistors, which are essentially switches that flick on and off to encode data as ones and zeros. Most transistors are made of inorganic semiconductors, but organic electronics depend on organic compounds. Whereas organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) have ions that accumulate only on the surface of the organic material, organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) rely on ions flowing in and out of organic semiconductors. This feature helps make OECTs efficient switches and powerful amplifiers.
https://spectrum-ieee-org.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/spectrum.ieee.org/amp/organic-transistor-2659297896