Current and Future Scientific and Commercial Opportunities for Organic Electronics

Organic materials have been developed over the past 20 years to the point where they can match or outperform conventional inorganic materials in applications such as light-emitting diodes, LEDs, and as thin film transistors. In applications such as smart phone displays, organic LEDs are rapidly displacing LCDs.  I will illustrate how breakthroughs in understanding of the underlying science have made this possible and set yet higher performance targets.  However, widespread adoption of organic electronics, particularly into new areas such as flexible and wearable devices, requires new manufacturing processes that can be carried out at low temperatures.  There are many possible approaches accessible with organic materials, particularly when processing from a liquid phase.  I will illustrate how techniques such as direct printing have been advanced to allow resolution down to below 100 nm.