Tobin Marks: New Research Could Lead To “Invisible” Electronics

December 1, 2006

Imagine your car windshield with directions to your destination actually displayed within the glass, military goggles with targets and instructions displayed right before a soldier’s eyes, or a billboard that doubles as a window. Researchers have long sought high-performance, transparent transistors to make it possible to create such devices, but have been unable to develop materials that could be “invisible” while still maintaining a valuable level of performance. New research led by Tobin Marks, professor of chemistry and materials science at Northwestern University, marks a significant step toward this goal.

Marks and his team have created devices that combine organic and inorganic materials to create transparent, high-performance transistors that can be assembled on both glass and plastics. The group combined films of the inorganic semiconductor indium oxide with a multilayer of self-assembling organic molecules that provides superior insulating properties to create transparent, high-performance thin-film transistors. The research is particularly significant because the indium oxide films can be fabricated at room temperature, allowing it to be produced at a low cost.

“This development provides new strategies for creating transparent electronics,” Marks says. “You can imagine a variety of applications for new electronics that haven’t previously been possible – imagine displays that would seem to be floating in space.”

In addition to being transparent, the transistors outperform the silicon transistors currently used in LCD screens (liquid crystal displays—the type of display used in cell phones, laptop and desktop computers, and modern TV screens). They perform nearly as well as high-end polysilicon transistors. Their research was published in the November 2006 issue of Nature Materials (the paper was published online on October 15, 2006). Marks has formed a start-up company, Polyera, to bring the technology to market.

Tobin Marks is Charles E. and Emma H. Morrison Professor of Chemistry, professor of materials science and engineering, and Vladimir N. Ipatieff Professor of Catalyic Chemistry. During his career, Marks has received numerous awards, including some of the most prestigious national and international awards in the fields of inorganic, catalytic, materials and organometallic chemistry. Recent honors include the American Institute of Chemists Gold Medal, the Burwell Award of the North American Catalysis Society, the Sir Edward Frankland Prize Lectureship of the British Royal Society of Chemistry and the Karl Ziegler Prize of the German Chemical Society.

Marks also is recipient of three American Chemical Society national awards and the American Chemical Society Chicago Section’s 2001 Josiah Willard Gibbs Medal, regarded by many as the highest award given to chemists next to the Nobel Prize. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.

Photo courtesy of Andrew Campbell/Northwestern Magazine.