UK researchers win award for work in organic semiconductors

Two UK-based researchers, who have developed a new method for making plastic electronic devices – or ‘organic semiconductors’ – have won an award at a major conference on the subject. The first Organic Semiconductor Industry Awards were held during the recent Organic Electronics Conference (OEC-06) in Frankfurt, Germany. Iain McCulloch and Martin Heeney of Merck UK won the Research & Development Award, for designing and synthesising a new class of organic semiconductor polymers. The judges said that the new material overcame the limitation of current semiconducting polymers, and moved the industry a step closer to making commercial products based on organic electronics. Tatsuo Hasegawa, of the Correlated Electron Research Centre (CERC) in Japan won the award for best conference paper. The judges selected his paper, ‘Inkjet printing of organic metal electrodes for contact engineering of Organic Field Effect Transistors’, because it was an original piece of work on organic metal electrodes, and described a novel direction to take for source/drain contacts. US firm Plextronics was judged best start-up for its technical and commercial progress over the past year.