First Sterilizable Flexible Organic Transistor

A team of researchers from Tokyo, Japan has succeeded in manufacturing a Sterilizable Flexible Organic Transistor on a polymeric film. It is enough robust under high temperature medical sterilization process.

Now a days the applications of electronics are increasing day by day in health and medical area as more IT devices are being introduced. The series ageing society with declining birthrate is expecting more from electronics. On these backgrounds electronics has more expectations about organic transistors, which is a soft electronic switch. A flexible organic transistor can easily be fabricated in bio-compatible polymeric film, through this we are expecting to adopt this to a wearable health monitoring systems without a stress and to implantable devices such as soft pacemaker. But for the practical implementation we should consider the following things. . .

1.  To make best use of softness and bio-compatibility
2.  To decrease the driving voltage down to few volts.
3. To decrease the risk of infections by sterilization.

The team had succeeded in manufacturing an organic transistor that has low driving voltage of 2V and high temperature stability on a polymeric film. This new Organic Transistor can be sterilized in a standard 150°C heat treatment sterilization processes without losing its electrical properties. They had developed a technique to make high densely packed Self Assembled Mono-layer (SAM) films with very small thickness of 2nm on a polymeric film. This will allow us to raise the substrate temperature up to 150°C without creating pin holes through SAM films due to high temperature treatment and the team demonstrated that the densely packed SAM films are stable at 150°C. It was also proved by systematic characterization of crystallographic structures of SAM using a synchrotron radiation beam.

This is a valuable step towards a long term implantable electronic devices that require sterilizable flexible electronic transistors.