IEEE Spectrum reports that an Illinois company can now print p-type polymeric transistors, making it possible for them to now print CMOS circuits. The article, Organic Semiconductor Breakthrough Could Speed Flexible Circuits, reports:
Although there are already polymer semiconductors that allow the printing of simple electronic circuits, for efficient flexible display screens or complex radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags, manufacturers need to be able to print semiconductors that are p-type—conducting positive charge carriers, or holes—and n-type, which use negative charge carriers, or electrons. The combination of the two generally makes for more power-efficient digital circuits because current should flow through them only when their bits are flipping. ?
Several p-channel semiconductors exist, but “polymeric n-channel semiconductors—practical ones—were unknown until our work,” says Antonio Facchetti, Polyera’s chief technology officer and an adjunct chemistry professor at Northwestern University. “If you want to enable high-performance CMOS electronics, you need both p-channel and n-channel semiconductors.”?
I wonder when this technology will be reliable enough and cheap enough to do at home?
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