Anyone who ever took an electronics laboratory class will be familiar with the fundamental passive circuit elements: the resistor, the capacitor and the inductor. However, in 1971 Leon Chua reasoned from symmetry arguments that there should be a fourth fundamental element, which he called a memristor (short for memory resistor). Although he showed that such an element has many interesting and valuable circuit properties, until now no one has presented either a useful physical model or an example of a memristor. Here we show, using a simple analytical example, that memristance arises naturally in nanoscale systems in which solid-state electronic and ionic transport are coupled under an external bias voltage. These results serve as the foundation for understanding a wide range of hysteretic current-voltage behaviour observed in many nanoscale electronic devices that involve the motion of charged atomic or molecular species, in particular certain titanium dioxide cross-point switches.

/pdf/the-missing-memristor-found-55upit5xe7.pdf

The missing memristor found

Recent advances in mechanics and materials provide routes to integrated circuits that can offer the electrical properties of conventional, rigid wafer-based technologies but with the ability to be stretched, compressed, twisted, bent, and deformed into arbitrary shapes. Inorganic and organic electronic materials in microstructured and nanostructured forms, intimately integrated with elastomeric substrates, offer particularly attractive characteristics, with realistic pathways to sophisticated embodiments. Here, we review these strategies and describe applications of them in systems ranging from electronic eyeball cameras to deformable light-emitting displays. We conclude with some perspectives on routes to commercialization, new device opportunities, and remaining challenges for research.

http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/327/5973/1603.full.pdf

Materials and mechanics for stretchable electronics

Since the discovery of highly conducting polyacetylene by Shirakawa, MacDiarmid, and Heeger in 1977, π-conjugated systems have attracted much attention as futuristic materials for the development and production of the next generation of electronics, that is, organic electronics. Conceptually, organic electronics are quite different from conventional inorganic solid state electronics because the structural versatility of organic semiconductors allows for the incorporation of functionality by molecular design. This versatility leads to a new era in the design of electronic devices. To date, the great number of π-conjugated semiconducting materials that have either been discovered or synthesized generate an exciting library of π-conjugated systems for use in organic electronics. 11 However, some key challenges for further advancement remain: the low mobility and stability of organic semiconductors, the lack of knowledge regarding structure property relationships for understanding the fundamental chemical aspects behind the structural design, and realization of desired properties. Organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) are a kind of device consisting of an organic semiconducting layer, a gate insulator layer, and three terminals (drain, source, and gate electrodes). OFETs are not only essential building blocks for the next generation of cheap and flexible organic circuits, but they also provide an important insight into the charge transport of πconjugated systems. Therefore, they act as strong tools for the exploration of the structure property relationships of πconjugated systems, such as parameters of field-effect mobility (μ, the drift velocity of carriers under unit electric field), current on/off ratio (the ratio of the maximum on-state current to the minimum off-state current), and threshold voltage (the minimum gate voltage that is required to turn on the transistor). 17 Since the discovery of OFETs in the 1980s, they have attracted much attention. Research onOFETs includes the discovery, design, and synthesis of π-conjugated systems for OFETs, device optimization, development of applications in radio frequency identification (RFID) tags, flexible displays, electronic papers, sensors, and so forth. It is beyond the scope of this review to cover all aspects of π-conjugated systems; hence, our focus will be on the performance analysis of π-conjugated systems in OFETs. This should make it possible to extract information regarding the fundamental merit of semiconducting π-conjugated materials and capture what is needed for newmaterials and what is the synthesis orientation of newπ-conjugated systems. In fact, for a new science with many practical applications, the field of organic electronics is progressing extremely rapidly. For example, using “organic field effect transistor” or “organic field effect transistors” as the query keywords to search the Web of Science citation database, it is possible to show the distribution of papers over recent years as shown in Figure 1A. It is very clear

Semiconducting π-conjugated systems in field-effect transistors: a material odyssey of organic electronics.

Printed electronics is a revolutionary technology aimed at unconventional electronic device manufacture on plastic foils, and will probably rely on polymeric semiconductors for organic thin-film transistor (OTFT) fabrication. In addition to having excellent charge-transport characteristics in ambient conditions, such materials must meet other key requirements, such as chemical stability, large solubility in common solvents, and inexpensive solution and/or low-temperature processing. Furthermore, compatibility of both p-channel (hole-transporting) and n-channel (electron-transporting) semiconductors with a single combination of gate dielectric and contact materials is highly desirable to enable powerful complementary circuit technologies, where p- and n-channel OTFTs operate in concert. Polymeric complementary circuits operating in ambient conditions are currently difficult to realize: although excellent p-channel polymers are widely available, the achievement of high-performance n-channel polymers is more challenging. Here we report a highly soluble ( approximately 60 g l(-1)) and printable n-channel polymer exhibiting unprecedented OTFT characteristics (electron mobilities up to approximately 0.45-0.85 cm(2) V(-1) s(-1)) under ambient conditions in combination with Au contacts and various polymeric dielectrics. Several top-gate OTFTs on plastic substrates were fabricated with the semiconductor-dielectric layers deposited by spin-coating as well as by gravure, flexographic and inkjet printing, demonstrating great processing versatility. Finally, all-printed polymeric complementary inverters (with gain 25-65) have been demonstrated.

A high-mobility electron-transporting polymer for printed transistors

About Supramolecular Assemblies of π-Conjugated Systems

At present, flexible displays are an important focus of research1,2,3 Further development of large, flexible displays requires a cost-effective manufacturing process for the active-matrix backplane, which contains one transistor per pixel One way to further reduce costs is to integrate (part of) the display drive circuitry, such as row shift registers, directly on the display substrate Here, we demonstrate flexible active-matrix monochrome electrophoretic displays based on solution-processed organic transistors on 25-μm-thick polyimide substrates The displays can be bent to a radius of 1 cm without significant loss in performance Using the same process flow we prepared row shift registers With 1,888 transistors, these are the largest organic integrated circuits reported to date More importantly, the operating frequency of 5 kHz is sufficiently high to allow integration with the display operating at video speed This work therefore represents a major step towards 'system-on-plastic'

Flexible active-matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors.

We demonstrate a rewritable, non-volatile memory device with flexible plastic active layers deposited from solution. The memory device is a ferroelectric field-effect transistor (FeFET) made with a ferroelectric fluoropolymer and a bisalkoxy-substituted poly(p-phenylene vinylene) semiconductor material. The on- and off-state drain currents differ by several orders of magnitude, and have a long retention time, a high programming cycle endurance and short programming time. The remanent semiconductor surface charge density in the on-state has a high value of 18 mC m−2, which explains the large on/off ratio. Application of a moderate gate field raises the surface charge to 26 mC m−2, which is of a magnitude that is very difficult to obtain with conventional FETs because they are limited by dielectric breakdown of the gate insulator. In this way, the present ferroelectric–semiconductor interface extends the attainable field-effect band bending in organic semiconductors.

/pdf/high-performance-solution-processed-polymer-ferroelectric-1vukow6fcd.pdf

High-performance solution-processed polymer ferroelectric field-effect transistors

Employing a conductive polymer as the bottom electrode material of a ferroelectric capacitor is shown to improve the ferroelectric properties of sub-100-nm-thick spin cast poly(vinylidene fluoride/trifluoroethylene) copolymer insulator films. It is demonstrated that a remanent polarization of 65mC∕m2 is switched with only 5.2V (80MV∕m) with a switching time of 80ms. Compared to similar capacitors but with an aluminum bottom electrode the main improvement is a reduction of the switching time with 3 orders of magnitude at this field strength.

/pdf/low-voltage-switching-of-a-spin-cast-ferroelectric-polymer-ootbhar1m8.pdf

Low voltage switching of a spin cast ferroelectric polymer

We demonstrate thin-film ferroelectric transistors, made entirely from organic materials that are processed from solution. The devices consist of thin ferroelectric poly(vinylidene fluoride/trifluoroethylene) films sandwiched between electrodes made of conducting poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) stabilized with polystyrene-4-sulphonic acid. On top of this stack, an organic semiconductor is applied. The ferroelectric transistors, constructed using unipolar p- or n-type semiconductor channels, have remnant current modulations of ∼103 with a retention time of hours. They can be switched in 0.1–1ms at operating voltages less than 10V.

/pdf/all-polymer-ferroelectric-transistors-2ege4ge8i2.pdf

Albert W. Marsman

Papers

Flexible active-matrix displays and shift registers based on solution-processed organic transistors.

High-performance solution-processed polymer ferroelectric field-effect transistors

Low voltage switching of a spin cast ferroelectric polymer

All-polymer ferroelectric transistors

Electrically Rewritable Memory Cells from Poly(3-hexylthiophene) Schottky Diodes