Hybrid organic semiconductor/gallium nitride/CMOS smart pixel arrays

有机半导体是一种非常令人兴奋的光电材料，在过去10-15年的发展中，英国发挥了至关重要和广泛认可的作用。这些材料在可见光谱范围内提供高效的光发射，同时适用于广泛的简单和可扩展的处理方法，如喷墨印刷。这些吸引人的特性导致了红、绿、蓝波长的高效电驱动发光二极管（led）的快速发展，已经在移动电话和大面积平板显示器等领域产生了重大的商业影响。世界各地的实验室已经证明，高性能的激光作用和光放大在这些材料中也是可能的，为可见波长激光器开辟了一条全新的途径——这一光谱区域已被证明难以用更成熟的固态激光技术完全覆盖。这开辟了许多新的应用领域，如光通信，仪器仪表，计量，光谱学和生物和化学传感。然而，这些设备目前需要单独的激光器泵送，并没有紧凑的，集成的形式。在这里，我们提出了一种开发集成有机半导体激光器的新方法，利用氮化镓无机半导体光电接口在电子控制下生产紧凑格式的有机器件。所提出的氮化镓器件，当由硅CMOS电子器件驱动时，为有机激光器产生蓝紫色泵浦光。这些技术都可以实现平面化和集成化，从而首次使有机激光器的性能置于计算机控制之下。这为一种非常通用的光学互连技术提供了前景，该技术既可以将平面内的有机元件耦合在新型平面光波电路中，充分利用有机物的通用处理潜力，也可以将模式可编程输出中继到其他应用接口，如生物仪器。此外，CMOS设计在波长范围内提供高灵敏度的片上光检测，低至单光子水平，氮化镓和有机物，从而开辟了主动反馈，调制和控制的新方法。这些属性为计算和通信的新兴领域提供了潜在的联系，包括量子信息处理和生物计算。要实现这些雄心勃勃的目标，需要一个庞大而协调的计划，这些目标汇集了一系列迄今为止基本上互不相干的技术。我们召集了一批具有所需互补技能和经验的领先研究人员，他们在跨学科研究方面也有成功合作的良好记录。

Organic semiconductors are a very exciting category of optoelectronic materials, in the development of which, over the past 10-15 years, the UK has played a vital and widely acknowledged role. These materials offer efficient light emission across the visible spectrum whilst being amenable to a wide range of simple and scalable processing methods such as ink-jet printing. These attractive properties have led to the rapid development of efficient, electrically-driven light emitting diodes (LED's) at red, green and blue wavelengths, that are already having significant commercial impact in areas such as mobile phones and large area flat-panel displays. Laboratories around the world have shown that high-performance laser action and optical amplfication is also possible in these materials, opening up an entirely new approach to visible-wavelength lasers - a region of the spectrum that has proven difficult to cover fully with more established solid-state laser technology. This opens up many new applications in areas as diverse as optical communications, instrumentation, metrology, spectroscopy and bio- and chemical-sensing. However these devices currently require separate lasers for pumping and are not available in compact, integrated form. Here, we propose a novel approach to the development of integrated organic semiconductor lasers, utilising a gallium nitride inorganic semiconductor optoelectronic interface to produce compact formats of organic device under electronic control. The gallium nitride devices, as proposed, produce blue-violet pump light for the organic lasers when driven by silicon CMOS electronics. These technologies can all be made planar and integrated one above the other, thus bringing the performance of the organic lasers under computer control for the first time.This offers the prospects of a very versatile optical interconnect technology that can either couple in-plane organic elements together in novel planar lightwave circuits taking true advantage of the versatile processing potential of the organics or relay the pattern-programmable output to other applications interfaces such as bio-instrumentation. In addition, the CMOS design offers highly-sensitive on-chip photodetection in the wavelength range, down to the single-photon level, of both the gallium nitride and the organics, thus opening up novel methods of active feedback, modulation and control. These attributes offer potential linkages in emerging areas of computation and communications including quantum information processing and bio-computing.Accomplishing these ambitious goals, which draw together a range of hitherto largely disparate technologies, requires a substantial and co-ordinated programme. We have assembled a partnership of leading researchers with the complementary skills and experience required, who also have an established track record of working together successfully on interdisciplinary research.