Organic Electronic Research Group

Organic electronics, also named plastic electronics or polymer electronics, is a field of electronics concerning conductive polymers and tiny molecule based electronic applications.

Because of the materials used, which are carbon based, it is called organic electronics. In traditional electronics cupper and silicon like inorganic conducters are being used.

In 2000 Alan J. Heeger, Alan G MacDiarmid and Hideti Shirakawa, according to their success on dicovering and developing the conductor polymers, were deemed to be given a Nobel Chemistry Award. Researchers produced oxidized, ionid injected polyacetylene.

Conductive polymers have become very ideal to be used in a variety of applications because of their lightness, flexibility and for sure their low prices. Furthermore, by using the organic materials, it is possible to carry out the applications which are impossible using traditional materials. Intelligent windows, electronic newspapers, flexible solar cells and flexible monitors can be counted as a few applications which can be done with using organic semi-conductors.

The reason, electronic devices are very wide and useful,is the fundamental of microelectronic technologies and the inorganic semi conductor, silicon. However,it is the primary product of over 95% of the chips produced yet  because of the high substructure and operating values it can not appeal to the low-prize demanding markets. At this very point, organic semi-conductors – with the advantages of their low substructure values, fusability to the wide and flexible surfaces, easy and fast production techniques and application based syntheses properties – have enough specialities to fill the fields that silicon can not.

In our laboratory which is dedicated to organic electronics, unique systems and devices containing polimers, liquid crystals etc. that can be avaluated  as soft matter, a subtopic of solid state physics, are being designed and produced. Those devices are OLED, organic based solar cells, organic transistors, organic diodes and electrocromic devices. The production and electrical characterization of the devices are also being made in the same laboratory. Also non-linear optic properties of  organic materials are being analysed.

The laboratory consists of 5 doctoral 4 post-graduate for a total 9 active students. The goal of the work in this laboratory is to solve the efficiency and stability problems in the organic material based electronic devices  which are the problems that prevents the devices to be commercially produced.

One of the in hand Tubitak (The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey) projects of our laboratory is Polymer Sollar Cells project. The purpose of this work is the increase in the efficiency of polymer cells. This purpose is achieved by using hybrid cells reaching 2.5% cell efficiency. Also, a work with the purpose of lengthening the working life of the organic solar cells continues correspondingly. Organic solar cells are being isolated from the oxygen surrounding by coating with the proper coating material and the effect of isolation on the cell life is being studied by preventing the oxygen and humidity penetration into the cell.

 Another current Tubitak project of our laboratory is a production and electric property analyses of thin film transistors with polymer semi-conductor materials project. The goal of the project is to proceed from inorganic based semi-conductors to organic based semi-conductor technology and producing organic field-effect transistor(OFET). Synthesing active semi-conductors and insulators is comparing the performance of the OFET prepared with the new polymers to the traditional OFET by eletrical characterization.

       The finalised Tubitak project in our laboratory is the analysis of conductive polymers by Situ ESR Technique project. In the project, conductivity mechanism of polythiophene, polypyrrole, polyethylenedioxythiophene (PEDOT) and polythiopheneacedicacid (PTAA) and their co-polymers are discussed. The nature of the spin is determined by the ESR-temperature relation. Assessment of the polymers mentioned above is done according to the polaron and bipolaron model and it is seen that polaron lattice is more dominant. Moreover, electrocromic properties of these polymers is discussed, and the works on producing Organic Light Emitted Diode(OLED) has begun.

Thanks to developing recording mediums, the researchers can conveniently store 1 Terabyte to 1 cm3 (i can't do superscript on here) on holographic recording in liquid crystals.  With the diffraction experiments the performances of such areas is analyzed, and there is plenty of publishing concerning the production

Another research topic is  to discuss the effective applications of  Multi-layered foward-feeded artifical neural network to observe some physical properties (thermal, optic, electric, magnetic etc)and analyse the obtained non-linear experimental data of nematic liquid crystals and organic solar cells.

To adapt the outputs of the fundamental sciences to the technology and to produce prototype devices is the primary goals of our research group, and at this point, thanks to a pring head, work on making the Organic Electronic applications is continuing with the cooperation of printer mechanics. Furthermore, a collaboration about “Polymer Solar Cell” production with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality and a project concerning to the collaboration is being successfully carried through.