Hi! Organic electronics is a technology that utilizes organic molecules or polymers to create electronic components for many application areas (photovoltaic, transistors, sensors, oleds, etc). Organics indeed may be lighter (useful for portable devices), and more flexible than conventional silicon-based inorganic materials. Also, they can undergo a wider range of chemical modifications, which, in turn, enables to fine-tune their properties (e.g., color).

Hi, and thank you! Well, to the best of my knowledge there are technical committees attempting to set standards for sustainability in the field of OE. These will need to comply with the current legislation on chemical substances, of course. But, you’re right, the field is extremely diversified and complex. And, also, this aspect didn’t draw much attention up to very recent times. Just like ‘ok, now let’s think about achieving the most efficient devices, it doesn’t matter how, then we’ll see’. This delay will be an issue. Fabrication plants are hard-pressed, for example, due to the regulatory requirements which ban the use of hazardous solvents. So, to make OE viable, the paradigm shift urges, also in terms of regulations and standards. Though I think the whole process will take a lot of time … substitutions of materials are not easy to identify, for example. They need to maintain performance, otherwise one will have a final product that is environmentally sustainable but not economically and socially sustainable. I also think, btw, that setting standards requiring LESS hazardous materials, and LESS energy than those for the state of the art devices would already be a good start.

It’s the stability of organics vs conventional inorganic materials. For organic photovoltaic cells, for example, efficiencies currently overcome those for amorphous silicon-based devices. The drawback is that you cannot use them on the top of the roof of your house to get electricity, at least not for a long time, because when exposed to the combination of heating and light, organics degrade faster , and your device loss it’s efficiency. However, OE are very important in complementary applications (the e-skin, for example, or the OLED displays , or portable photovoltaics( much lighter devices are possible). Another point is that charge mobility in organic semiconductors is inherently lower than that in the inorganic counterparts, and this means that it would not be possible to reach the performance of the most performing types of inorganics. But this is not the objective. The major objective is to complement them. In fact, some characteristics are not possible to be achieved by conventional inorganics , like transparency, lightness, low energy manufacturing (OE devices can be printed like newspapers!) Examples of benchmark organic semiconductor are polythiophenes, pentacene derivatives, etc. For the dielectrics also polysaccharides, silicone rubbers, silk fibroins and so on. You need to have something which can be easily ‘polarized ‘ We recently carried out a study were we used polymers extracted from brewers spent grains (which is a byproduct of the brewing industry) to make dielectrics for transistors