Mechanisms Governing the Growth of Organic Oligophenylene “Needles” on Au Substrates

Today, 50 years after the first introduction of the transistor inorganic semiconductors, most importantly Si and GaAs are still the materials of choice for producing high performance, fast semiconductor devices. In the past decade, however, organic materials are attracting an increasing amount of interests with regard to use them as active compounds in semiconductor devices. These applications generally do not aim at high-end applications such as very fast switches, instead the current interest aims at developing to establish low cost or plastic electronics. The most important application presently are radio frequency identification devices (RFID), which will be used to identify not only individual objects like luggage on an airport but will also be used to identify products, e.g., to the cashier in the supermarket. Soft, organic materials made of either polymers or large molecules are under intense investigation by an increasing number of groups in many countries. Since organic materials have already made their way to electronic applications, for example, in connection with organic light-emitting diodes, it is rather likely that the first commercial products employing organic materials as active component in an electronic device, like an organic field effect transistor (OFET) will be introduced fairly soon.