Rolled-up drain vertical organic transistors towards bioelectronic and neuromorphic applications

Abstract

Rapidly progressing industries, such as communication, healthcare, automobile, chemical, and robotics, are imposing ever-growing demands on developing low-cost, robust, reliable, and portable sensors. Additionally, one of the grand challenges of the 21st century is to advance health informatics, which implies that highperformance bioelectronic devices for sensing and transducing the electrical activity of cells, or even organs such as the brain, are of extreme importance. Therefore, keeping in view these requirements, this project proposes the development of gas and pressure sensors and artificial synaptic networks based on vertical organic transistors that utilize rolled-up nanomembrane (NM) as a drain electrode. The transistor fabrication will rely on conventional lithography and thin film deposition methods. The permeability of the source electrode to the electric field will be obtained by patterning through micro-/nano-lithography techniques. The first part of the project will focus on the development of vertical OFET-based pressure and gas sensors. The use of rolled-up NMs also presents an opportunity for the direct interaction between gaseous analytes and the semiconductor layer. This property will be addressed to effectively detect nitric oxide, whose controlled inhalation has been proposed as a viable treatment of novel coronavirus (COVID-19). The inherent flexibility of rolled-up NMs is advantageous to prepare innovative compression gauges with high-pressure sensitivity. The second part will be dedicated to developing a vertical transistor for ion-to-electron transducers and artificial synaptic systems.