This invention relates to electronic circuit components. Electronic circuit components have commonly been made in significant part of inorganic semiconductor material, such as silicon or gallium-arsenide, which have been doped with a variety of compounds in part to allow the physical state (e.g., the conductance) of the semiconductor material to be controlled by the applied potential. A wide variety of electrical characteristics have been realized with such components.
The present invention substantially differs from the foregoing conventional semiconductor devices. Specifically, the electronic components disclosed herein are fabricated in significant part from organic materials, rather than inorganic materials; because of this, it is possible to control the state of the components by electrical potential changes that are considerably smaller than those used to control the state of conventional semiconductor devices (100-1000 mV vs. 3000-5000 mV).
This decrease in the operating voltage range occurs because the conductance of the disclosed components are very steeply voltage-dependent. One advantage of decreasing the operating voltage range is that it reduces a device's power consumption, which varies with the square of the operating voltage. This means that such devices in principle can be more densely packed than is possible with conventional solid state devices. In addition, the reduction in the operating voltage and power consumption should allow operation of the components from the voltage and power delivered from a single (solar) power cell.