Plastics are materials renowned for their excellent mechanical properties, such as strength and flexibility, and for being electrical insulators. Some types of plastics can be made into semiconductors or full conductors of electricity. These non-insulating plastic materials belong to the class of so-called conjugated polymers. When heavily doped, these polymers can have high conductivity, even exceeding the values of well known inorganic semiconductors.
Although devices using polymers are not very new, in most of the transistors that have been developed so far only the semiconducting part of the device is a polymer. The conducting parts of the transistor, such as the source, drain and gate electrodes, and the gate dielectric, are still made from conventional inorganic materials.
Now, researchers at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands have developed the technology to make "all-polymer" transistors in which all the parts are made from plastic. They have also gone a step further and combined these components to make all-polymer integrated circuits.
In the March issue of Physics World, Dago de Leeuw of Philips Research Laboratories describes how plastics may revolutionize electronics.