Smart Devices Based on Soft Materials

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Conventional active electronic devices are based on crystalline semiconducting materials,predominately silicon. Although the dominance of silicon continues with its limits being continuallyexpanded, other technologies on the horizon have significant promise for complementary functionsand applications unsuitable to silicon. Active “soft materials” such as conducting polymers,organic/inorganic composites and biological materials have interesting properties that can be used toprovide unique functionality. These materials can also have the advantage of being compatible withflexible substrates and simple printing techniques for the fabrication of devices. Using a combinationof soft materials, such as a conducting polymer, a gel electrolyte, and a suitable contact material,electronic/ionic/photonic devices can be fabricated. These devices can be made to operate not onlyin response to electrical signals but also using the movement and availability of ions. Being inherentlyelectrochromic, meaning that their state of electronic operation is evident from their colour, allowsoptical interrogation to be used as a readout mechanism. To date we have used electronic/ionic/photonic devices to implement transistors,sigmoid transfer functions, and both short andlong term memory elements as well as investigating several photoactive device technologies for implementing optical control. The proposed program is to further this work to allow combining arrays of these active elements with a compatible parallel input technology, such as printable photoactive arrays, permitting the formation of 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional systems that emulate functionssimilar to those normally accomplished using neurons in biological systems (neuromorphic). In the long term this will make possible the fabrication of complex cellular structures for the implementation of retina-likeimage processing functions. Adding more layers and other functionalities, like optical gating and/ormultiple selective ion transport, will allow for even more complex intelligent processing systems.The implementation of some "intelligent" functions in neuromorphic hardware is an important area of research that has recently become very popular due to the rise of work on memristor-type technologies, which are a part of this effort. This work has and will continue to expand the knowledge in this area and and push toward commercialization of the technologies in Canada adding a complementary effort to software-based AI, in which Canada is already at the forefront.