Never before!Swedish researchers create the world’s first “wooden transistor” | Urban Tech Story

Swedish researchers claim to have built the world’s first wooden transistor. Foreign media The Register reported that researchers at Linköping University and KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden said they had successfully built a “T” gate transistor with three pieces of balsa wood and published it in the paper middle.

The top of the T is used as a transistor channel, one end is the source (Source), the other end is the drain (Drain), and the vertical part of the T uses two pieces of balsa wood with a gap in the middle to form the gate of the transistor. To convert plain old balsa wood into conductive wood, the researchers first exposed it to high temperatures and used chemicals to extract most of the lignin from the tree-like structure, leaving a porous cellulose mass that was then dipped in a conductive polymer. middle.

After removing lignin, the researchers found that Polystyrene sulfonate (or PEDOT:PSS), a water-soluble conductive polymer, was easily filled into balsa wood because it behaved like water. After filling the polymer and assembling it, the Swedish team found that it was conductive, could act as a double-gate organic electrochemical transistor and function on/off.

According to Linkoping University, previous wood-based transistors could only regulate ion transport and cease to function once the ions were depleted, but this is not the case with this design, which can operate without deterioration.

Organic electrochemical transistors are the closest to Swedish-made wood electrochemical transistors (WECT). Although not as small as silicon transistors, they can still be millimeter-sized and switch at kilohertz rates. Will this revolutionize the semiconductor industry? In fact, the balsa transistor with conductive function is neither small nor fast. Because the operation speed is too slow, it cannot be turned off within 1 second, and it must take 5 seconds to turn it on, which is completely impossible for supercomputing.

However, the researchers said in their paper that their results “demonstrate that the conductivity of electroactive wood can be tuned by applying an external voltage.” Wood-integrated applications of simple logic circuits may be candidates.

The team believes their conceptual device could be used in bioelectronics and plant electronics, and that this device could help them develop smaller, more numerous, faster devices. “We propose a principle that has never been done before, wood transistors are slow and bulky, but they do work and have huge potential,” said Isak Engquist, a senior associate professor at Linkoping University’s Laboratory of Organic Electronics and author of the paper, although without considering Specific applications, but hopefully this incident will stimulate further research to see future applications.

(Source of the first image:Linköping University）

Further reading: