As demand rises for flexible and lightweight electronics, so does the need to develop industrial-scale, low-cost processes to fabricate them. One possible method to create printable electronics is to disperse a highly conductive, organic coating material on a flexible substrate. To date, a conducting polymer known as PEDOT:PSS has been at the heart of several prototype solar cells, LEDs, and other applications. The p-type organic thermoelectric material uses positively charged holes to conduct electricity. But various opto- and bioelectronic devices rely on complementary mixtures of p-type and n-type materials, the latter of which relies on negatively charged electrons for conductivity.
This picture shows an n-type conducting polymer ink in an ethanol solvent being sprayed on a surface. To make the ink, postdoc Chi-Yuan Yang and Simone Fabiano of Linköping University in Sweden and their colleagues started with BBL, a polymer known for its conductivity. They doped it with PEI, an...
