Applications Of Organic Electronic Devices In Sensor--Organic Optocoupler Design

Organic electronic materials and their applications are brand new research areas in recent years. It combines the knowledge of physics, chemistry and electronics. A discipline of Plastic Electronics is going to form. Organic electronic materials are also called organic semiconductors, conducting polymers, conducting plastic, conjugated polymers et al. They are a novel class of electronic materials which combine the optical and electronic properties of semiconductors with the processing advantages and mechanical properties of polymers.A great deal of effort has been devoted to organic electronic materials due to their potential applications. Prior to the 1970s, all synthetic polymers were electrical insulators. They are often used for the protective coatings around wires. In 1977, a landmark paper in PRL described treating polyacetylene with halogens, and in doing so increased its electrical conductivity to almost the level of a poor metal. Alan Heeger, Hideki Shirakawa and Alan Mac Diarmid received the Nobel Prize for chemistry in 2000 "for the discovery of conducting polymers". Their work led to the field of organic electronics and opened the way to a host of organic electronic devices which has resulted in several commercial applications. They also helped to spur new areas of fundamental research in condensed matter physics.While most electronic devices today are powered by chips made of silicon, organic electronics refers to transistors and electronic systems where organic semiconductors are used instead of silicon.Organic materials are diverse and easy to process. Organic electronic materials have achieved much attention due to their unique properties: cheap, light, flexible, light-emitting. They are applied in areas such as light-emitting diodes, light emitting electrochemical cells, photodiodes, organic solar cells, organic field-effect transistors, plastic circuits et ac. The number of applications is increasing rapidly as properties such as conductivity, lifetime and processability improve.The operating life of the polymer light emitting diodes has been improved to the level of 103-104 hours at above 100cd/m2. The high performance polymer light emitting diodes and photodiodes are of great interests not only for traditional applications but also for sensors and photoelectronic devices. To find the applications of organic electronic materials in sensors is our mainly study works. A new type of optocoupler made with OLED and photodiodes is studied. Low-frequency analog signals are transferred by the organic optocoupler. Our experimentations show that there are obviously distortions when squared-wave is transferred. It's not suitable for transmitting digital signal or high-frequency signals on present. The results of experimentations also give some hues to the study of carrier mobility in organic electronic materials.The field of plastic electronics is moving rapidly from fundamental research to industrial research. The dream of using semiconducting and metallic polymers for fabricating novel photonic devices, electronic devices, and optical devices is becoming reality.