Transparent Electronics: An Emerging Technology

Hello Readers ! This Post is about an emerging Technology that will take Smartphones and other Electronic Gadgets  to another level , i am talking about Transparent Electronics also known as Invisible Electronics. Let me start with an Example , suppose you are driving a Car and if you want to look at the Speedometer or GPS Navigation Maps , you need to bend your neck down to look them , but with Transparent electronics technology, all the information will be shown on the Front Windshield itself thus saving your precious time. In transparent electronics the Silicon based Electronics is replaced with invisible Networks and Components. Achieving Invisible or transparent Electronics is a Great Challenge as we know transparent materials like Glass or Plastic are Insulators and Insulators don't conduct because of Large Fermi Energy Gap between Valence band and Conduction Gap but to achieve Transparent Electronics , two Technologies that is  TCO and TTFT comes into action. TCO stand for Transparent Conducting Oxides and TTFT is Transparent Thin Film Transistor.These materials are wide band Semiconductors  and  this is what makes them useful for realization of Invisible Circuits.

Raising the Fermi Level of TCO by Degenerate Doping and Burstein Moss shift to achieve Conductivity and Transparency

Thus TCO or Transparent Conducting Oxides are Oxides of Transition metals like ZnO , SnO InSnO etc are used thet helps in achieving Optical Transparency along with Electrical Conductivity. This Technology has several Benefits like this technology employs low or room temperature while its fabrication as compared to Si based semiconductors that requires temp. b/w 700-1100 degree. Also Transparent electronics offers high Carrier mobility, better Chemical stability , ease of manufacture  and  have flexibility and many other advantages and they find applications like antistatic coatings, UV detectors , LCD Panels, High Sensitive Transparent Sensors and Security purpose like Invisible Cameras and Invisible RFID's.

Milestones achieved and Advancement :

While Google-ing about the Same, i came to know that researchers at Oregon State University and Hewlett Packard (HP) were the first that introduced a new class of materials that are used for making Transparent Transistors.  Most of the early development in this field used n-type materials while these days  scientists are working on p-type materials that offers more conductivity(around 200 times) as compared to n-type. 

Till now many inventions have been recorded in this field but none of them is available to Consumers till now. Some of the Inventions are:

1. A group of Korean Scientists have developed TRAM or Transparent RAM memory that consists of Transparent Oxide films and Electrodes placed on a Glass.
2. NTT docomo and Fujitsu have developed an 2.4 inch Phone with resolution of 320 x 240 pixels.

3. Samsung Transparent Smart Window (46 inch display) at CES 2012 grabbed a lot of attention.
  
 Update  1-12-2013 :

UCLA engineers develop a stretchable, foldable transparent electronic display