Hybrid organic semiconductor/gallium nitride/CMOS smart pixel arrays

有机半导体是一类非常令人兴奋的光电子材料，在过去10-15年的发展过程中，英国发挥了至关重要的作用，并得到了广泛的认可。这些材料在可见光范围内提供高效的发光，同时适用于各种简单和可扩展的处理方法，如喷墨打印。这些诱人的特性导致了红色、绿色和蓝色波长的高效电驱动发光二极管(LED)的快速发展，这些LED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，在这些材料中也可以进行高性能的激光作用和光学放大，从而开辟了一种全新的可见波长激光方法--事实证明，更成熟的固态激光技术很难完全覆盖这一光谱区域。这在光通信、仪器仪表、计量学、光谱学以及生物和化学传感等领域开辟了许多新的应用。然而，这些设备目前需要单独的激光器来泵浦，并且不能以紧凑、集成的形式提供。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产生紧凑型有机器件。所提出的氮化镓器件在硅cmos电子器件的驱动下，为有机激光器产生蓝紫色泵浦光。这些技术都可以平面化并相互集成，从而首次将有机激光器的性能置于计算机控制之下。这提供了一种非常通用的光学互连技术的前景，该技术可以在新型平面光波电路中将面内有机元件耦合在一起，真正利用有机物的多功能处理潜力，或者将图案可编程输出转发到其他应用接口，如生物仪器。此外，在氮化镓和有机物的波长范围内，该芯片设计提供了高灵敏度的片上光电检测，可精确到单光子水平，从而开辟了主动反馈、调制和控制的新方法。这些特性为新兴的计算和通信领域提供了潜在的联系，包括量子信息处理和生物计算。要完成这些雄心勃勃的目标，需要一个实质性的协调计划。这些目标汇集了一系列迄今大相径庭的技术。我们已经组建了一个由具有互补技能和经验的领先研究人员组成的伙伴关系，他们也有在跨学科研究方面成功合作的既定记录。

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.