Novel materials for organic electrochemical transistors

Organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs) have been demonstrated in a wide range of applications such as analyte detection, neural interfacing, impedance sensing and neuromorphic computing. Majority of OECTs use PEDOT:PSS and liquid electrolytes. In this talk, I will discuss the development of biomaterials as solid state electrolytes and conjugated polyelectrolytes (CPEs) as semiconductors for OECTs. The biogels that consist of gelatin and glycerol with high ionic conductivity are used as solid electrolytes. We establish a relation between morphology and protonic-conductivity of the gels, allowing for the fabrication of gel-based OECTs with desirable functionalities, good ON/OFF ratio and transconductance, fast-switching speed, and good stability in ambient air. Anionic CPEs are used as mixed conductor materials for OECTs to replace PEDOT:PSS. CPE-based OECTs operate in the accumulation mode, which allows for much lower energy consumption in comparison to commonly used depletion mode PEDOT:PSS devices. The physical and electrical properties of CPE-K have been fully characterized to allow a direct comparison to other top performing OECT materials. CPE-K demonstrates an electrical performance that is among the best that have been reported in the literature for OECT materials.