Engineering – Page 20

Electronics based on protein fragments rather than silicon chips are being developed by an Israeli research team. The new approach could lead to lighter, cheaper and completely flexible electronic devices within the next two to three years, they say.

Yoav Eichen, Nir Tessler and colleagues at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology have developed a new class of organic semiconductor, which they can use as electronic-grade material. Their electronic peptides are built one amino acid unit at a time using a laboratory peptide synthesizer, a machine more commonly used in the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries for making peptides of therapeutic interest. The researchers simply tap in a required amino acid sequence and the machine produces the exact molecule they require from vials of amino acids.

Nir Tessler

This approach has given the researchers precise influence over the properties of their materials. Tessler explains that they want to be able to make their electronic peptides with as much control as manufacturers in the conventional electronics industry. Making a material in the same way an engineer at Intel or IBM makes an electronic device is very different to regular chemistry, explains Tessler. By adding building blocks we can create a new functional material just as if we were adding transistors to resistors and capacitors to make a circuit with a given function, we want 100 percent control that will give us close to zero errors.

Basing molecular electronics on peptides rather than novel but disparate compounds precludes the need to devise new synthetic routes each time the researchers want to make a change to the materials’ properties. You use only one method to connect them all and you know very well how to connect them, with no need to invent a new chemical process every time you want a different sequence with different properties, explains Eichen. The team’s precision-manufacturing approach means they obtain electronic grade material that does not break down when it carries a current in stark contrast to many unstable organic semiconductors.

Gadi Schuster

Eichen adds that electronic peptides are not intended to replace silicon-based circuitry in today’s computers. Nevertheless, the researchers have great plans for their materials and suggest they may have applications in creating full colour, foldable device displays that have resolution superior to even the best current computer screens. They also envisage using them to make large, flexible Solar panels that might be unrolled like a blanket and spread flat and rolled up again for easy transport and storage. The first applications of electronic peptides might be in sensor technology for medical diagnostics and environmental monitoring.

Yoav Eichen

Tessler, Eichen and colleagues have now received a patent for electronic peptides and have spun out Peptronics Ltd to exploit their invention commercially. What we have to do now is invest a lot of hard work to fully realise the potential of this new technology. There is no doubt that we will run into problems sooner or later but so far, it’s working like magic, Tessler says.

Category: Engineering

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