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nanotimes EU-Projects

Development of High-Performance Organic Electronic Circuits

The Heterogeneous Technology Alliance (HTA), a team of leading European technology institutes (VTT, Fraunhofer, CSEM and CEA-Leti) announced that it strongly contributes to develop high-performance organic electronic circuits. It is possible due to their extensive efforts in processing, circuit design, model- ling, and characterisation.

So far the appearance of organic thin film transistors (OTFTs) and circuits in industrial products has been limited. The main obstacle for substantial market pe- netration of such organic electronic components has been the inability to achieve the necessary device performance combined with the necessary high- volume production methods. In response to this, two European Union funded research projects, COSMIC and POLARIC, aim to revolutionize the way printed electronic circuits are made.

One of the key elements making such progress possible is the recent progress in air-stable, printa- ble, n-type semiconductor materials, which have not been previously available. Thus, it is now possible to combine p- and n-type thin film transistors into complementary logic, which offers many advantages in terms of performance of the printed electronic circuits. The related technology in the silicon based electronics, Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semicon- ductor or simply CMOS technology has proven to be very competent in terms of noise and power con- sumption.

The main target in the COSMIC project is the deve- lopment of p- and n-type OTFTs and their integra- tion to complementary logic. This adds processing tolerance to organic integrated circuits, improves the noise margins, allows higher complexity, increases yield, and allows lower supply voltage demand. In COSMIC an analogue to digital converter coupled to a temperature sensor will be demonstrated, show- ing for the first time the potential of OTFTs in the sensors and actuator market. A silent authentication tag comprising a first organic RF receiver will also be build, to show organic electronics’ potential in the field of item-level, secure tracking of goods using realistic protocols.

The POLARIC project has extensive activities in organic complementary technology development as well. However, the main focus in the project is in increasing the electronic performance by mini- mizing the critical dimensions of the OTFTs. It is important to do this maintaining compatibility to high throughput fabrication methods. The enabling tech- nique here is to apply roll-to-roll compatible nanoim- print lithography in the transistor fabrication. This high resolution method will enable smaller transistor channel length (below 1µm) and thereby an increase in the performance of the device. The demonstrati- on applications in POLARIC are active matrix liquid display and radio-frequency identification tag.

12-04 :: April/May 2012