Cheap Plastic #Semiconductors to Rival Speeds of Today's Fastest Chips

"Organic" semiconductors doesn't mean pesticide-free, but rather that they are made from low-cost plastic instead of expensive silicon, albeit running at speeds a thousands time slower than conventional microchips, at least until now. Look for inexpensive plastic chips to start outperforming expensive silicon chips within 10 years. R.C.J.


University researchers have reported a breakthrough that could help organic semiconductors bridge the considerable performance gap with silicon chips. Organic semiconductors offer easier low-temperature processing than silicon, resulting in lower cost semiconductors with highly tunable properties. Unfortunately, the poor carrier mobility of organic materials makes their performance characteristics lag behind traditional inorganic semiconductors by a thousand times or more. The researchers at McGill Universtiy (Montreal) demonstrated a method of endowing organic semiconductors with the performance characteristics of inorganic materials by copying their highly ordered nanoscale structure with bottom-up self-assembly techniques...
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