ORGANIC ELECTRONICS

The common characteristics of plastics are the excellent insulation properties that the materials display. However, throughout the 20th Century scientists have reported on the subtle conductive properties that plastics demonstrate. Consequently, the 1970s brought about the fist true organic metal, as well as the Nobel Prize winning discovery at The University of Pennsylvania of organic materials with semiconducting properties. This remarkable observation immediately opened up a range of technology application for conducting and semiconducting polymers including organic transistors.

The first organic transistor was demonstrated in 1986, and as performance steadily increased throughout the '80s and '90s, the first integrated circuits were fabricated. Organic complementary circuits, which are characterized by greater speeds and lower power consumption compared to the first organic transistors were first developed by Dr. Dodabalpur et al. while at Lucent Technologies (Bell Laboratories) in 1996.

The performance characteristics of the organic materials, though still vastly inferior to silicon- based technologies, are becoming appropriate for commercial electronic circuits and display technologies. However, the primary goal of the organic electronic industry is to create electronics that are not only functional but also printable. The reason this is possible is that these plastic materials have the ability to be cast into a liquid form, applied at room temperature and atmospheric pressure, and thus passed through ink jets or printing presses. Consequently, due to recent discoveries and developments at OrganicID, the Team believes that current performance of the organic semiconductors are sufficient to develop low-cost circuits for RFID applications.