Washington, August 18 (ANI): A new research from the University of Washington scientists has described an approach to organic electronics that allows transport of both positive and negative charges.

Until now, however, circuits built with organic materials have allowed only one type of charge to move through them.

Now, new research from the University of Washington makes charges flow both ways.

“The organic semiconductors developed over the past 20 years have one important drawback. It’s very difficult to get electrons to move through,” said lead author Samson Jenekhe, a UW professor of chemical engineering.

“By now having polymer semiconductors that can transmit both positive and negative charges, it broadens the available approaches. This would certainly change the way we do things,” he added.

A major drawback with existing organic semiconductors is most transmit only positive charges.

In the last decade, a few organic materials have been developed that can transport only electrons.

But, making a working organic circuit has meant carefully layering two complicated patterns on top of one another, one that transports electrons and another one that transports holes.

“Because current organic semiconductors have this limitation, the way they’re currently used has to compensate for that, which has led to all kinds of complex processes and complications,” Jenekhe said.

Over the past few years, Jenekhe’s lab has created polymers with a donor and an acceptor part, and carefully adjusted the strength of each one.

In collaboration with Watson’s lab, they have now developed an organic molecule that works to transport both positive and negative charges.

“What we have shown in this paper is that you don’t have to use two separate organic semiconductors. You can use one material to create electronic circuits,” Jenekhe said.

The material would allow organic transistors and other information-processing devices to be built more simply, in a way that is more similar to how inorganic circuits are now made.

The group used the new material to build a transistor designed in the same way as a silicon model and the results show that both electrons and holes move through the device quickly.

The results represent the best performance ever seen in a single-component organic polymer semiconductor, according to Jenekhe.

Electrons moved five to eight times faster through the UW device than in any other such polymer transistor.

A circuit, which consists of two or more integrated devices, generated a voltage gain two to five times greater than previously seen in a polymer circuit.

“We expect people to use this approach. We’ve opened the way for people to know how to do it,” Jenekhe said. (ANI)