Hot Article: Rubicene: a molecular fragment of C70 for use in organic field-effect transistors

03 Apr 2014

If cells are the building blocks of life, an analogy can be made that transistors are the building blocks of the digital world. They could be credited as the discovery of the 20th century. One of the IEEE milestones, transistors can be counted as biggest step in technology. For the first 20 years after the discovery of transistors, Germanium based transistors were used all over the globe replacing vacuum tube based gadgets. Germanium transistors certainly helped kick off the table size computer age, but silicon based transistors revolutionized the design of it and produced an entire industry in California namely silicon valley. But researchers would not be termed researchers if they stopped inventing and innovating making this world a better place to live. Inventions of materials like graphene, carobon nanotubes and fullerens are stretching the boundaries and making a dent in bringing a new generation of transistors which would shrink the size of electronic gadgets even further with landmark speed.

Excellent Performance of the Rubicene as semiconductor for transistor

Rubicene, a molecule with unusual electronic properties, is capturing the imagination of researchers as a molecule for a new generation transistors. Lee et al. successfully attempted use of this promising organic semiconductor material for organic field effect transistors. Rubicene, molecular fragment of C70 also a type of cyclopenta fused polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon is well suited for the this application because of the high electron affinity. Lee et al studied theoretical electronic properties along with energy level alignments. Investigators also investigated the performance of Rubicene on the pentafluorobenzenethiol(PFBT) self-assembled mono-layer on Au electrodes. They found the mobility of the charge carriers was increased remarkably and also showed that systems like Rubicene based transistors will take the transistors to the higher levels. This suggests that no matter where development goes, transistors will continue to drive product research and technological advances.

Rubicene: a molecular fragment of C₇₀ for use in organic field-effect transistors
Hyunbok Lee, Yue Zhang, Lei Zhang, Timothy Mirabito, Edmund K. Burnett, Stefan Trahan, Ali Reza Mohebbi, Stefan C. B. Mannsfield, Fred Wudl and Alejandro L. Briseno
J. Mater. Chem. C, 2014, Advanced Article. DOI:10.1039/C3TC32117G

Padmanabh Joshi is a guest web writer for the Journal of Materials Chemistry blog. He currently works at the Department of Chemistry, University of Cincinnati.

To keep up-to-date with all the latest research, sign-up to our RSS feed or Table of contents alert.