| Posted: Mar 07, 2018 |
New transistor concept, solar cell included
(Nanowerk News) Transistors are everywhere in modern electronic devices. They are in your phones, your radios, your computers… Where wires transport electricity from A to B, transistors can modulate the current between high and low states which, translated into sequences of 1s and 0s, is the basis of the age of information.
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But your phone needs more than transistors to work; it also needs an energy source. All electronic devices are connected up to a battery of some kind, requiring cables, sometimes complex systems and a lot of space –the battery is the single biggest component of any mobile phone.
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What ICN2 researchers propose in this work is a compact self-powered transistor that incorporates the energy source and the transistor into the same slim unit. What’s more, the energy source is the Sun.
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Published in Advanced Functional Materials ("A Solar Transistor and Photoferroelectric Memory"), the work explains how the “transistor effect” is achieved by using a ferroelectric oxide to create the heterojunction needed for solar functionality. Such a set-up harnesses the switchable polarisation of this ferroelectric layer to achieve off and on states –1s and 0s– in the flow of electrons harvested by the organic semiconductor.
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Coined the “solaristor”, this game-changing concept combines the best of solar cells and the best of transistors into a single device the size of a biological cell.
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