Chemical design, synthesis and thin film supramolecular architecture for advanced performance chemo- and bio-sensing organic field effect transistors

Organic thin film transistor (OTFT) sensors are capable of fast, sensitive and reliable detection of various classes of chemical and biological analytes with high selectivity, and display the additional advantage of being compatible with plastic electronic technologies. Their distinctive versatility is based on multilevel control of the properties, from molecular design up to device architecture. Here Phenylene-thiophene based semiconductors functionalized with bio-molecules have been synthesized to be used as active layers in sensing OTFTs. These materials, indeed, combine the recognition capability of bio-molecules with the electronic properties of the conjugated backbone. The resulting OTFTs have been used to perform chemical recognition of citronellol obtaining detection limit in the ppm range.