Organic Transistors — Present and Future

Organic materials are almost everywhere in electronic devices. They are used for instance in lithography and encapsulation. They are everywhere, but at the very heart of the device, upon which silicon still imposes its dictatorship. Nevertheless, organic semiconductors do exist, and have indeed been largely studied since the early fifties [1]. It has been shown that metal-semiconductor (MS) and metal-insulator-semiconductor (MIS) structures can be realized with these organic materials. Practical applications were even thought to be within reach in 1978, when a photovoltaic cell made with merocyanine — an organic dye — was claimed to present a power efficiency close to 1% under AMI solar illumination [2]. Unfortunately, this yield, which is still one order of magnitude too small, has not been improved to date, but the domain is still active [3–5].