03/02/2025
The latest issue of J-FLEX (Volume 3, Issue 11) was just released!
In this Special Issue, we celebrate the invention of the transistor, over 75 years ago, in 1947 by physicists John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley at AT&T Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey in USA [1-3], who all shared in the 1956 Nobel Prize in Physics. This first working transistor, a point-contact transistor, is widely considered to have launched the modern-day electronics age. But even predating Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley, Julius Edgar Lilienfeld, recently immigrated to USA from what is now known as Lviv, Ukraine, to the Boston area of Massachusetts, proposed the concept of a field-effect transistor (FET) through a US patent application in 1926 [4], almost 100 years ago, although he never attempted to build a working prototype.
Today, the thin film transistor (TFT) has evolved from these discoveries to revolutionize the field of display technology, driving the extinction of cathode ray tube (CRT) and plasma displays. For every flat panel display commercially sold in retail stores now, whether a television, a computer monitor, a laptop, a tablet, or a phone, etc., each pixel is driven by a TFT to control greyscale and color. At the core, TFTs are deposited onto a substrate, any substrate, whether crystalline or amorphous, while still producing functional transistors, unlike advanced silicon CMOS for digital computing, high-speed III-V transistors for communications, or high-voltage wide bandgap transistors for the electrification of motors, where those classes of transistors are created by crystalline transistors atop crystalline substrates, often by epitaxy, keeping the deposited layers in registry with the crystalline substrate template. The advent of TFT technology, largely non-crystalline atop glass, has permitted electronics to permeate new vistas, particularly large area applications, like displays.
By unlocking a pathway for efficacious TFTs atop a range of substrates, this also provided a pathway for reduced temperature processing, allowing a range of softer and flexible substrates, like Corning’s Willow® glass and various plastics, to be accessed too. Thus, this Special Issue examines some key evolution within the flexible electronics community on transistors, including TFTs, but also the nascent organic bipolar transistor, which could be poised for great future impact.
So, it gives this Guest Editorial team great pleasure to introduce the following contributions to this very unique Special Issue on flexible electronics transistors during these key anniversary years.
About the Cover: The advent of thin-film transistors (TFT) began in earnest with its evolution from the first field-effect transistor proposed in a patent application in 1926 and the first working transistor, a point contact transistor, developed at AT&T Bell Labs in 1947. The image conveys a timeline from those nascent discoveries and inventions at the beginning of the 20th Century through to the end of the 20th Century, when flat-panel displays displaced bulky displays whereby TFTs were literally the driving force behind red–green–blue (RGB) pixelated displays. In the 21st Century, TFT evolution is now transforming these flat-panel displays into flexible displays and opening vistas for completely new use cases, like medical wearables in the form of electronic tattoos.
The Lilienfeld patent ( #1,745,175, filed on October 8, 1926) image was obtained from sources related to the www.uspto.gov website.
The AT&T Bell Labs point contact transistor image was obtained with permission from the Bell System Memorial website (https://memorial.bellsystem.com/) from their “History of the Transistor” section.
The cover art for this special issue was designed by Mr. Enrique Sahagún from Scixel.
https://ieee-jflex.org/
J-FLEX is a joint publication of IIEEE Sensors Council(SC), IIEEE Electron Devices Society(EDS), and IIEEE Circuits and Systems Society(CASS):
The IEEE Journal on Flexible Electronics publishes cutting edge research on flexible substrates.
