Upscaling Organic Electronic Devices

Conventional electronics based on silicon, germanium, or compounds of gallium require prohibitively expensive investments. A state-of-the-art microprocessor fabrication facility can cost up to $15 billion while using environmentally hazardous processes. In that context, the discovery of solution-processable conducting (and semiconducting) polymers stirred up expectations of ubiquitous electronics because it enables the mass-production of devices using well established high-volume printing techniques. In essence, this thesis attempts to study the characteristics and applications of thin conducting polymer films (<200 nm), and scale them up to thick-films (>100 μm). First, thin-films of organic materials were combined with an electric double layer capacitor to decrease the operating voltage of organic field effect transistors. In addition, ionic current-rectifying diodes membranes were integrated inside electrochromic displays to increase the device’s bistability and obviate the need for an expensive addressing backplane. This work also shows that it is possible to forgo the substrate and produce a self-standing electrochromic device by compositing the same water-processable material with nanofibrillated cellulose (plus a whitening pigment and high-boiling point solvents). In addition, we investigated the viability of these (semi)conducting polymer nanopaper composites in a variety of applications. This material exhibited an excellent combined electronic-ionic conductivity. Moreover, the conductivities in this easy-to-process composite remained constant within a wide range of thicknesses. Initially, this (semi)conducting nanopaper composite was used to produce electrochemical transistors with a giant transconductance (>1 S). Subsequently, it was used as electrodes to construct a supercapacitorwhose capacitance exceeds 1 F