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Organic Semiconductors and OFETs (Eds. Hong Meng & Guangcun Shan)
Impressive improvements have been made in the performance of organic field effect transistors (OFETs) in the past two decades, thanks to the efforts devoted to organic materials development, device engineering and understanding of device physics. OFETs are based on various small molecules, conjugated oligomers and polymers. The improved device performance and the advantages offered by organic materials such as easy processibility, inherent flexibility, light weight, and biocompatibility have drawn continuous attention from both academic and industry. OFETs have potential application in flexible display backplanes, sensors, memories and RFID tags. Recent advances in flexible OFETs and their applications in biomimetic sensory and nervous systems have aroused great interest in novel products and use cases for the future. The understanding on organic semiconductors, device engineering and device physics will be addressed in this special issue. A variety of functional devices based on OFETs will also be reviewed.
 
The scope of this focus issue in Frontiers of Physics would cover all of the aspects from material design and synthesis, device engineering and integration, device physics and functional devices, etc. This special issue will present the major recent progress in this field from the best experimental and theoretical teams all over the world. We do hope that the issue will form a broad overview of the current state of this cutting-edge field.
 
Specific areas of interest covered in this issue include but not limited to:
 ●  Design and synthesis of organic semiconductors
 ●  Device engineering and integration
 ●  Device physics, modeling and characterization
 ●  Memories and synaptic transistors
 ●  Phototransistors and organic light emitting transistors
 ●  Sensors and other functional devices
 ●  Organic single-crystal devices

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  • TOPICAL REVIEW
    Miao Zhu, Muhammad Umair Ali, Changwei Zou, Wei Xie, Songquan Li, Hong Meng
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(1): 13302. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-020-0985-1

    Tactile and temperature sensors are the key components for e-skin fabrication. Organic transistors, a kind of intrinsic logic devices with diverse internal configurations, offer a wide range of options for sensor design and have played a vital role in the fabrication of e-skin-oriented tactile and temperature sensors. This research field has attained tremendous advancements, both in terms of materials design and device architecture, thereby leading to excellent performance of resulting tactile/temperature sensors. Herein, a systematic review of organic transistor-based tactile and temperature sensors is presented to summarize the latest progress in these devices. Particularly, we focus on spotlighting various device structures, underlying mechanisms and their performance. Lastly, an outlook for the future development of these devices is briefly discussed. We anticipate that this review will provide a quick overview of such a rapidly emerging research direction and attract more dedicated efforts for the development of next-generation sensing devices towards e-skin fabrication.

  • TOPICAL REVIEW
    Changbin Zhao, Muhammad Umair Ali, Jiaoyi Ning, Hong Meng
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(4): 43202. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-021-1053-1

    Organic phototransistors (OPTs), compared to traditional inorganic counterparts, have attracted a great deal of interest because of their inherent flexibility, light-weight, easy and low-cost fabrication, and are considered as potential candidates for next-generation wearable electronics. Currently, significant advances have been made in OPTs with the development of new organic semiconductors and optimization of device fabrication protocols. Among various types of OPTs, small molecule organic single crystal phototransistors (OSCPTs) standout because of their exciting features, such as long exciton diffusion length and high charge carrier mobility relative to organic thinfilm phototransistors. In this review, a brief introduction to device architectures, working mechanisms and figure of merits for OPTs is presented. We then overview recent approaches employed and achievements made for the development of OSCPTs. Finally, we spotlight potential future directions to tackle the existing challenges in this field and accelerate the advancement of OSCPTs towards practical applications.

  • REVIEW ARTICLE
    Lixing Luo, Wanning Huang, Canglei Yang, Jing Zhang, Qichun Zhang
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(3): 33500. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-020-1045-6

    As high-performance organic semiconductors, π-conjugated polymers have attracted much attention due to their charming advantages including low-cost, solution processability, mechanical flexibility, and tunable optoelectronic properties. During the past several decades, the great advances have been made in polymers-based OFETs with p-type, n-type or even ambipolar characterics. Through chemical modification and alignment optimization, lots of conjugated polymers exhibited superior mobilities, and some mobilities are even larger than 10 cm2·V−1·s−1 in OFETs, which makes them very promising for the applications in organic electronic devices. This review describes the recent progress of the high performance polymers used in OFETs from the aspects of molecular design and assembly strategy. Furthermore, the current challenges and outlook in the design and development of conjugated polymers are also mentioned.

  • TOPICAL REVIEW
    Ming-Chao Xiao, Jie Liu, Yuan-Yuan Hu, Shuai Wang, Lang Jiang
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(1): 13305. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-020-0997-x

    With the development of device engineering and molecular design, organic field effect transistors (OFETs) with high mobility over 10 cm2·V−1·s−1 have been reported. However, the nonideal doubleslope effect has been frequently observed in some of these OFETs, which makes it difficult to extract the intrinsic mobility OFETs accurately, impeding the further application of them. In this review, the origin of the nonideal double-slope effect has been discussed thoroughly, with affecting factors such as contact resistance, charge trapping, disorder effects and coulombic interactions considered. According to these discussions and the understanding of the mechanism behind double-slope effect, several strategies have been proposed to realize ideal OFETs, such as doping, molecular engineering, charge trapping reduction, and contact engineering. After that, some novel devices based on the nonideal double-slope behaviors have been also introduced.

  • TOPICAL REVIEW
    Si Liu, Hongnan Wu, Xiaotao Zhang, Wenping Hu
    Frontiers of Physics, 2021, 16(1): 13304. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11467-020-0993-1

    Rubrene, a superstar in organic semiconductors, has achieved unprecedented achievements in the application of electronic devices, and research based on its various photoelectric properties is still in progress. In this review, we introduced the preparation of rubrene crystal, summarized the applications in organic optoelectronic devices with the latest research achievements based on rubrene semiconductors. An outlook of future research directions and challenges of rubrene semiconductor for applications is also provided.