Projects

After the discovery of conductive polymers in the seventies of the last century, a new field of research, organic electronics, has developed within a short time, which deals with the production of electronic components based on plastics. The most important component is the transistor, which can be used as an amplifying element, as a switch, as a storage element or also as a sensor. At the Chair of Electronics such organic field effect transistors are fabricated, characterized and modeled. The aim is to achieve simple fabrication while maintaining good electrical properties of the component.

In addition to the simple organic field effect transistor (OFET), which is the basis of many applications in electronics, research is also being conducted at the Chair of Electronics on its use as a memory cell. For this purpose, the gate dielectrics of OFETs are modified or supplemented by suitable additional layers in such a way that charges can be stored there by applying suitable gate voltages, which ultimately leads to a shift in the component’s operating voltage. In this way, non-volatile memories can be constructed whose information is retained for a long time even without applying an operating voltage. At the Chair of Electronics, the memory mechanisms, memory dynamics and long-term memory behavior of such memory cells are investigated and improved.

Structures made of carbon fibers have been used in many areas of technology for some time, as they are characterized by high strength combined with low weight. One problem here, however, is that damage that is not visible externally can, under certain circumstances, lead to sudden failure of the component. The aim is therefore to detect and localize even the smallest damage in such structures in good time and during operation. The Chair of Electronics is therefore working on methods to reliably detect even the smallest damage in carbon fiber structures by measuring the electrical properties of the structure, such as electrical resistance or capacitance, already during operation.

In recent years, research has been conducted at the Chair of Electronics on organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) with alternative, non-toxic and inexpensive cathode materials. Diodes were developed with the material sodium stearate, which is also a basic component of many soaps. This OLED exhibits a special current-voltage characteristic resulting from different injection mechanisms at the cathode that depend on the electric field strength. These mechanisms, which are based on the quantum mechanical tunnel effect, are currently being implemented (along with other physical models specifically required for modeling organic materials) in a device simulator designed for one-dimensional (1D) structures and written in the C++ programming language in order to be able to simulate the behavior of the OLED.