College of Engineering, Design & Computing Events

Dr. Eliana Aquino Van Etten, PhD

PPGE3M, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil

Organic electronics have been a hot research topic for the last 30 - 40 years. The prospect of realizing flexible, low cost, high volume, and biodegradable electronic devices has incentivized academia and industry into a multidisciplinary development effort involving physics, chemistry, materials science, electronics, and various engineering disciplines. The advances in this field are notable; previous works have demonstrated charge mobilities of organic semiconductors (OSC) on the same order of magnitude as amorphous silicon. Already in the market, there are commercialized devices in the form of solar cells, flexible screens, and sensors. Comparison to the inorganic counterpart, Si, is relevant — most of the fundamentals and concepts applied to OSC are derived from traditional semiconductor device physics. However, the aim of developing organic electronic devices is not to compete with Si in high-performance applications. It is to open pathways for new applications, for example, with bioabsorbable devices in the area of medicine.

In this seminar, I will present a technique for creating organic field-effect transistors (OFETs) on flexible substrates and their characterization. This work was part of my doctoral studies. The team and I built and evaluated OFETs with different channel lengths. Through the optimization of crosslinking, the degree of hydrolysis, and the molecular weight, we defined the characteristics and configurations of the poly (vinyl alcohol) (PVA) as a gate dielectric. The challenge of integrating polymers of different polarities: PVA and poly (3-hexyl thiophene), the chosen OSC, was overcome and opened a path to the construction of capacitors, OFETs, and inverters. The optimization of this technology may lead to the creation of flexible, organic logic devices for every-day applications.

Bio.
Dr. Eliana Van Etten is a Brazilian materials engineer with a diverse set of professional experiences in the industry and academia. She completed her doctorate in 2017, at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil. She has worked for 10+ years in the semiconductor and advanced materials industry in both Brazil and Germany. Dr. Van Etten recently moved to Colorado and has been looking into research opportunities in the region. Email Address: elianavanetten@gmail.com