Novaled and CDT Speed OTFT Progress

Press releases from both Novaled and CDT caught my eye this week. Both seem to promise an organic electronics of the future with performance capabilities and addressable markets that go well beyond where we are today. Novaled is the latest company to throw its hat into the organic CMOS ring. CDT has announced its new Universal Organic Thin Film Transistor (UOTFT) model, which enables "circuit designers to design and simulate circuits using OTFTs"

In the world of conventional semiconductors, it was the invention of CMOS that really got the business humming and ultimately made for the current ubiquity of computer logic and memory in our lives. Today, OTFTs are targeted towards important but limited applications; flexible backplanes and RFID chips, mostly.

Could organic CMOS help move the applicability of OTFTs into new areas; making them a common solution in pervasive computing, for example? Or boost the performance for existing OTFT applications?

We don't yet know the answer to those questions, but Novaled's contribution to emerging organic electronics technology will come in the form of new p- and n-dopants, that have emerged from its work in OLED lighting and displays. CDT's contribution is a specialized model/circuit simulator - developed with Silvaco - which CDT says "will speed development and commercialization of low cost rigid and flexible electronics applications of organic semiconductor technology."

The CDT model combines universal charge-based field effect transistor modeling with OTFT specific channel charge, mobility bias, temperature dependences, and nonlinear contact resistances. While this model is based on existing analog simulators, new modeling approaches aimed specifically at organic electronics make it easier and faster to deal with areas where organic electronics varies considerably from classical MOSFET or even silicon TFT models. According to CDT, the most notable differences between the two are a trap-assisted charge distribution and mobility behavior, unipolar or bipolar charge accumulation operation mode and non-ohmic contact resistances.