Biopolymer Materials For Electronic & Photonic Applications

Preliminary research with biopolymer materials for electronics and photonics started around the year 2000 with only a hand full of researchers, including members of my previous lab at the Air Force Research Laboratory in the USA and members from Professor Naoya Ogata’s lab at the Chitose Institute of Technology in Japan. It was focused primarily on deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-based materials. It has since grown into a large Asian, European and US consortium, developing new biomaterials and biopolymer-based devices, producing hundreds of papers, several books and book chapters and multiple patents. Work with biomaterials has evolved to include not only DNA, but nucleobases as well. These are all abundant, inexpensive and non-fossil fuel-based
green materials that will not deplete the natural resources or pollute the environment. Enhancements in device performance for both electronic and photonic devices have been realized, including organic and inorganic light emitting diodes, thin film transistors, capacitors, electromagnetic interference shielding and electro-optic modulators. This seminar will provide an engineer’s / physicist’s perspective of this research, including a background, previous research with DNA biopolymer-based materials, and current research including nucleobase-based biopolymer materials, which have similar electromagnetic and optical properties to those of DNA, but have much higher thermal and mechanical stabilities. Using nucleobases as passivation, buffer and charge blocking layers, significant enhancements in device performance, yield and stability for polymer-based capacitors, organic light emitting diodes, non-linear optic polymer electro-optic modulators and twodimensional semiconductors have been achieved. Where silicon is the building block for inorganic electronics, biopolymer hold promise to be the building block for organic electronics and photonics.