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An organic transistor with light intensity-dependent active photoadaptation

Nature Electronics volume 4, pages 522–529 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

The development of artificial visual systems that mimic biological systems requires devices that can autonomously adapt their response to varying stimuli. However, emulating biological feedforward visual adaptation is challenging and requires complementary photoexcitation and inhibition, ideally in a single device. Here we show that an organic transistor that incorporates two bulk heterojunctions is capable of light intensity-dependent active photoadaptation. The approach couples the photovoltaic effect in bulk heterojunctions with electron trapping in the dielectric layer, allowing adaptive modulation of the carrier concentration of the transistor. Our device exhibits active photoadaptation behaviour for light intensities ranging over six orders of magnitude (1 to 106 cd m−2). We also define an active adaptation index to describe the luminance-dependent changes to sensitivity, including auto-background control, which for our devices is comparable to that of the human visual system (less than 2 s at 1 × 104 cd m−2).

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Fig. 1: Visual adaptation in bioreceptors and a bioinspired OAAT.
Fig. 2: Characterization of active adaptation behaviour.
Fig. 3: Identification of the fundamental role of the two BHJs in an OAAT.
Fig. 4: Working mechanism of the electric behaviour in an OAAT.
Fig. 5: Biomimetic visual perception ability of OAATs.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4971666).

Code availability

The code that supports the theoretical plots within this paper is available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

C.-a.D. acknowledges financial support from the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2017YFA0204700 and 2018YF-E0200700), the National Natural Science Foundation (62075224, 62001454 and 22021002), the Strategic Priority Research Program of Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDPB13) and the K.C. Wong Education Foundation (GJTD-2020-02).

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Author notes

  1. These authors contributed equally: Zihan He, Hongguang Shen, Dekai Ye.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences, CAS Key Laboratory of Organic Solids, Institute of Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zihan He, Hongguang Shen, Dekai Ye, Lanyi Xiang, Wenrui Zhao, Jiamin Ding, Chong-an Di & Daoben Zhu

  2. School of Chemical Sciences, University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Zihan He, Hongguang Shen, Lanyi Xiang, Wenrui Zhao, Jiamin Ding & Fengjiao Zhang

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  1. Zihan He
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Contributions

C.-a.D. conceived and led the research. D.Z. supervised the project. Z.H., H.S. and D.Y. proposed the idea. Z.H. and H.S. fabricated the devices, performed electrical measurements and analysed the data. C.a-.D., Z.H., H.S. and D.Y. wrote the main manuscript, with comments from all authors. F.Z. performed KPFM measurements. L.X., W.Z. and J.D. provided comments during the experiments and writing of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Chong-an Di.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Electronics thanks Choongik Kim, Tao Li and Xiujuan Zhang for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–24, Note 1 and References.

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He, Z., Shen, H., Ye, D. et al. An organic transistor with light intensity-dependent active photoadaptation. Nat Electron 4, 522–529 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41928-021-00615-8

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