High‐Mobility Fungus‐Triggered Biodegradable Ultraflexible Organic Transistors

Abstract

Biodegradable organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) have drawn tremendous attention for potential applications such as green electronic skins, degradable flexible displays, and novel implantable devices. However, it remains a huge challenge to simultaneously achieve high mobility, stable operation and controllable biodegradation of OFETs, because most of the widely used biodegradable insulating materials contain large amounts of hydrophilic groups. Herein, it is firstly proposed fungal-degradation ultraflexible OFETs based on the crosslinked dextran (C-dextran) as dielectric layer. The crosslinking strategy effectively eliminates polar hydrophilic groups and improves water and solvent resistance of dextran dielectric layer. The device with spin-coated 2,7-dioctyl[1]benzothieno[3,2-b][1]benzothiophene (C8-BTBT) semiconductor and C-dextran dielectric exhibits the highest mobility up to 7.72 cm 2 V −1 s −1 , which is higher than all the reported degradable OFETs. Additionally, the device still maintains high performance regardless of in an environment humidity up to 80% or under the extreme bending radius of 0.0125 mm. After completion of their mission, the device can be controllably biodegraded by fungi without any adverse environmental effects, promoting the natural ecological cycles with the concepts of "From nature, for nature". This work opens up a new avenue for realizing high-performance biodegradable OFETs, and advances the process of the "green" electrical devices in practical applications.

Edible polysaccharide-based ultraflexible organic transistors for nutritive electronics

“…The polar hydrophilic groups of dextran act as an electron trap and can trap mobile carriers. 5,[50][51][52][53] Hence deterioration in the amount of leakage current occurs. Chemical crosslinking methods can effectively reduce polar hydrophilic groups.…”

“…Nutritive electronics is a new class of biodegradable electronic devices, which not only biodegrade rapidly, but can also be absorbed by organisms to provide nutrition and energy. [1][2][3] Thanks to their unique advantages of being eco-friendly, biodegradable, biocompatible, edible, and nutritious, they have exhibited tremendous application prospects in green electronic skins, [3][4][5][6] implantable medical electronics, 1,2,4,5,[7][8][9][10][11][12] and intelligent food monitoring. 4,[6][7][8] To achieve these novel applications, the development of ultraflexible nutritive electronics is an urgent priority.…”

“…1,10 On the other hand, these nutritive electronics are made of degradable and absorbable functional materials, avoiding various adverse impacts such as inflammation, secondary injury, and environmental pollution after completing specific tasks. [3][4][5]8,9,13,14 However, the acquisition of ultraflexible nutritive electronic devices remains a considerable challenge due to the limitation of the ultrathin device structure and the lack of degradable, absorbable nutrient functional materials.…”

“…[24][25][26] Additionally, natural materials are the most promising candidates for nutritive electronic devices due to their special superiorities of being low-cost, renewable, and biodegradable. 3,5,25,27,28 Although some natural materials, such as honey, chicken albumen, cellulose paper, gelatin, and alginate, have been used as dielectric layers to fabricate OFETs, [29][30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45] however, to the best of our knowledge, few reports investigate the absorbability and nutrition ability of OFETs due to the field still being in an emerging stage. For instance, Bonacchini et al prepared totally ingested OFETs using a submicrometric ethylcellulose film as a transferrable substrate and gate dielectric by an all-printed method and assessed the toxicity, but with no mention of its nutritive capacity.…”

Biodegradable Natural Pectin-Based Polysaccharide-Gated Low-Voltage Flexible Oxide Thin-Film Transistors for Logic Applications

“…Various degradable transistors have been developed to reduce the waste footprint during recent years. − Rogers et al reported a CMOS-compatible ultrathin silicon MOSFET as well as the logic gates, of which thermal SiO 2 was used as the dielectric material; Liu et al . proposed fungal-degradation ultra-flexible organic-field-effect transistors with the cross-linked dextran (C-dextran) taken as the dielectric layer; Peng et al fabricated cellulose nanofibril-gated degradable IGZO TFTs by inkjet printing . These transistors have exhibited excellent electrical performance, but the requirement of a relatively high (>5 V) operating voltage will greatly limit their future application to ″green″ portable and wearable electronics.…”