Carbon Nano Tubes Again!

By Author: Isabella Evans
Total Articles: 11
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Did your tutors in Melbourne teach you about the various applications of carbon nanotubes? You must have read our first article on carbon nanotubes – A LIFT TO THE SPACE. Well here is another yet more useful application of carbon nanotube.

US researchers have incorporated carbon nanotubes into organic light-emitting transistors (OLETs) to create devices that overtake their silicon counterparts. This technology could lead to much larger flat screen televisions and displays, which are also cheaper to manufacture.

Organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs) produce brighter light than liquid crystals and are cheaper to make than inorganic LEDs. Polycrystalline silicon transistors - semiconductor devices used to amplify and switch electronic signals - are used to make up the backplane of OLED electronic displays. However, it is difficult to make uniform polycrystalline silicon grains and this limits the size of display you can make.

Now a team of researchers, led by Andrew Rinzler at the University of Florida, Gainesville, has tackled this problem by adding a thin network of carbon nanotubes to a transistor. This ...
... transistor can perform the switching functions an electronic display needs at very low voltages. 'The goal is to allow people to build larger screens.

The team took the design one step further and incorporated an OLED layer into the carbon nanotube-based transistor to produce an efficient OLET (organic light emitting transistor) - a device that acts as both a transistor and light source for an electronic display. The device includes a network of carbon nanotubes mounted on a thin dielectric layer. The device is sandwiched between two electrodes and the organic light emitting material is on top.

On passing a small current through the device provides enough power to produce different coloured light. By adding different organic semiconductors the team was able to produce red, green or blue light without the need for a separate transistor and OLED.

It appears that his concept has the potential to significantly improve OLED display resolution, increase panel size and reduce power consumption, according to an expert in organic electronic materials at the University of Surrey, UK. However, this concept will need to be confirmed by display manufacturers.

Rinzler believes that his OLET design could be commercialized in the near future. His team plans to build arrays of OLET-based pixels to check whether the carbon nanotube technology can be scaled up for big screens. Their goal is to demonstrate all the pieces for a display manufacturer to look at this technology seriously.

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