Recent progress of organic transistor integrated circuits for large-area sensor applications

Abstract

Center for Collaborative Research, the University of Tokyo, Tokyo 153-8505, Japan 1. Introduction Organic field-effect transistor (FET) integrated circuits (ICs) are attracting considerable attention since their properties are complementary to silicon-based VLSIs, which are high-performance, but expensive. Organic ICs are mechanically flexible, shock-resistant, thin, and lightweight. Furthermore it is expected that organic transistor integrated circuits would be ultra-low in cost even for large area. Mobility of organic transistors is about two or three orders of magnitude lower than silicon and the resultant circuit is slow in speed. The slow speed may not fit for video and RF applications, but it is acceptable for most of area sensor applications (1-6). In this paper, we present recent advances of organic transistors and their applications to two kinds of large-area sensors; electronic artificial skins (E-skins) and sheet image scanners.