Colloquium Natural and Life Sciences - Ghada H. Ibrahim

Route to flexible electronics

Since the first introduction of transistor by Shockley in Bell Labs in 1940, Silicon technology has evolved rapidly. This evolution merely followed their early predictions defined by Moore's law with downscaling from few microns to few nanometers and with metal layer stacks up to 17 layer. Due to its fragility, large area electronics (including printable, flexible or organic electronics) has emerged as a new way of making electronics using novel electronic materials trying to replace rigid Silicon. Which are often formulated as inks and processed using low temperature processes such as printing and coating. Examples include photovoltaics, lighting, display, sensing systems and intelligent objects.
Much progress has been made over the last 20 years in producing new functional materials with suitable performance and stability in operation. One of the successful commercial products it OLED displays. Other fields are currently working on following OLED success such as organic photovoltaics and thin film transistors.

In this lecture we will go through the various development paths of thin film flexible transistors while focusing on organic thin film transistors and their foreseeable applications.