On the Stability of Selected Hydrogen-bonded Semiconductors in Organic Electronic Devices

The electronics era is flourishing and morphing itself into Internet of Everything, IoE. At the same time questions arise on the issue of electronic materials employed: especially their natural availability and low cost fabrication, their functional stability in devices, and finally their desired biodegradation at the end of the life cycle. Hydrogen bonded pigments and natural dyes like Indigo, Anthraquinone and Acridone have robustness in functionality and versatility in designing electronics and sensors components, and are bio-origin and biodegradable. With this Perspective Article, we intend to coalesce all the scattered reports on the above mentioned classes of Hydrogen bonded semiconductors, spanning across several disciplines and many active research groups. The article will comprise both published and un-published results, on stability during aging, upon electrical, chemical and thermal stress, and will finish with an outlook section related to biological degradation and biological stability of selected hydrogen bonded molecules employed as semiconductors in organic electronic devices. We demonstrate that when the purity, the long range order and the strength of chemical bond, are considered, then the Hydrogen-bonded organic semiconductors are the privileged class of materials having the potential to compete with inorganic semiconductors. As an experimental historical study of stability, we fabricated and characterized organic transistors from a material batch synthesized in 1932 and compared the results to fresh material batch.