Organic photodiodes rival silicon devices

Although silicon photodiodes are widely employed in a host of light-detection technologies, scaling them up is difficult and expensive. Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) in the US have now compared the performance of these diodes with that of organic polymer-based diodes, which are easy to fabricate over large areas. Somewhat to their surprise, the researchers found that the organic devices match their inorganic counterparts in all areas apart from one: response time. “The result goes against conventional wisdom that switching to organic materials that can lead to scalable devices would mean giving up on performance,” says team member Bernard Kippelen.