The vocabulary of technical terms used by research groups in the electronics industry now includes the words organic, plastic, and polymer. These words are common in chemical engineering and certainly can not be related to anything in the electronics word…correct? Not necessarily.
Organic electronics, plastic electronics, and polymer electronics are ideas being bounced around in corporate R&D departments and many universities. They are added to a list of innovative electronics that came about from thinking outside the box.
This list includes printable electronics and flexible electronics that most of us are familiar with, but what are these new electronics all about?
I know a little bit about chemistry since it was one of my majors in college.
I graduated almost forty years ago, so the information I kept in permanent storage inside my head may not be readily available, but let’s see what I can remember.
Way back then, organic chemistry was defined as carbon chain molecules synthesized through a biological process. However, technical advances made over the last century now allow many of the organic molecules to be synthesized through an artificial process.
For example, plastic and polymer materials such as epoxy resin and polyethylene resin are artificially synthesized from simple hydrocarbon molecules.
Generally, most of the organic molecules are electrically inert, and this is the reason why insulated materials such as the base substrates in printed circuit boards are made of plastic resins.
Today’s electronics devices and printed circuit boards consume a huge amount of organic and plastic materials for insulation and packaging or housing, but, they are not recognized as organic electronics or plastic electronics. Active parts such as conductors, semiconductors and optical parts could probably be made with organic materials or organic electronics.
A lecture delivered by one of my professors showed that some organic molecules could be electrically conductive and semi-conductive by introducing special functional branches, while other molecules could be optically active.
These topics were reviewed very quickly when I was in school, and professors did not spend too much time on this subject matter.
Fast forward 40 years, and today’s researchers are developing new electrically active organic molecules. In fact, one can read new posts concerning these advances every week.
One example is organic EL material that is already used in commercial applications as the basic material for organic EL displays. We can categorize this as organic electronics.
Now, even some researchers are trying to develop new functional organic molecules.
These new organic molecules are electrically conductive or semi-conductive; however, their electrical performances are still much lower compared to traditional electronic devices made from inorganic materials. Truth be told, it could be another five or ten years before they can be used commercially.
Meanwhile, can we categorize silver inks used to develop thick film circuits as organic electronics? (After all, it’s definitely a hybrid material.)
Conductivity is achieved because silver ink is made from inorganic silver metal powder, but it is formed as conductor traces with organic resin binders. This is the main material for printable electronics, but some researchers say they cannot be categorized as organic electronics while others say they can.
However, classification is really not important because it is already a money-making product in the electronics industry.
Source: EPT Newsletter, VentureOutsource.com, October 2009
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