Plastic electronics

Organic electronics is a field of materials science concerning the design, synthesis, characterization, and application of organic small molecules or polymers that show desirable electronic properties such as conductivity. Unlike conventional inorganic conductors and semiconductors, organic electronic materials are constructed from organic (carbon-based) small molecules or polymers using synthetic strategies developed in the context of organic and polymer chemistry. One of the promised benefits of organic electronics is their potential low cost compared to traditional inorganic electronics. Attractive properties of polymeric conductors include their electrical conductivity that can be varied by the concentrations of dopants. Relative to metals, they have mechanical flexibility. Some have high thermal stability.

One class of materials of interest in organic electronics are electrical conductive, i.e. substances that can transmit electrical charges with low resistivity. Traditionally, conductive materials are inorganic. Classical (and still technologically dominant) conductive materials are metals such as copper and aluminum as well as many alloys.

The earliest reported organic conductive material, polyaniline, was described by Henry Letheby in 1862. Work on other polymeric organic materials began in earnest in the 1960s, A high conductivity of 1 S/cm (S = Siemens) was reported in 1963 for a derivative of tetraiodopyrrole. In 1977, it was discovered that polyacetylene can be oxidized with halogens to produce conducting materials from either insulating or semiconducting materials. The 2000 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Alan J. Heeger, Alan G. MacDiarmid, and Hideki Shirakawa jointly for their work on conductive polymers. These and many other workers identified large families of electrically conducting polymers including polythiophene, polyphenylene sulfide, and others.

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