Electronics on plastic: A solution to the energy challenge, or just a pipe dream?

For over 50 years, conjugated organic compounds have been recognized as an important class of electronic semiconductor materials, with potential application to light emission and detection. Very recently, these materials have been shown to generate extremely high efficient white light, and can also have high detection efficiencies. Due to their very low cost and low deposition temperatures, this suggests that organic thin film semiconductor light emitting diodes and solar cells may present a practical solution to mankind's greatest challenge: the use and generation of low cost renewable, and largely pollution free energy. In this talk, I will address both the reality and fantasy of this suggestion. While organic thin film devices can have extremely high performance, they also suffer from shorter operational lifetime than conventional semiconductor (e.g. silicon) devices. And, although their low cost has yet to be proven in large scale manufacturing environments, the potentially unlimited promise of this materials class is driving a substantial global research effort to determine their ultimate applicability to meeting our energy challenges.