EE Times – E-textiles, robot ‘skin’ among advances at IEDM

HANCOCK, N.H. — The upcoming International Electron Devices Meeting will explore the range of potential applications for crystalline organic semiconductors.

The technology occupies an intriguing niche between high-performance silicon and low-end amorphous silicon or polymer electronics. Like polymers, crystalline organic compounds are carbon-based and thus easy to work with. But like crystalline silicon and other inorganic semiconductors, they have better performance than amorphous compounds, making them attractive for a wider number of applications.

The most prominent application to have emerged thus far is the flat-panel display, where organic light-emitting diodes offer low-cost processing on a variety of substrates. But other application areas, such as radio-frequency ID tags, have yielded some promising developments.

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In another exotic application, arrays of pentacene organic transistors have been built into a flexible sheet to create a pressure-sensitive “skin” for robots at the Quantum Phase Electronics Center of the University of Tokyo. The sensor arrays are built layer by layer on polyimide films. The design could be realized with large-area printing technology to create low-cost, flexible membranes that could imbue robots with a sense of touch similar to that of the human hand, making them much more dextrous than in the past, the researchers said.