Paper- and membrane-based ion-modulated electronics

The subject of the thesis is paper- and membrane-based ion modulated electronics. The aim of the work has been to create cheap, environmentally friendly and burnable electronics, to be used in everyday disposable end-products.  The base components that are developed and presented in this thesis are transistors and capacitors. More complicated logic circuits are also fabricated using these components. The substrates that are used when realizing these electronic components are a multilayer coated paper and a polymer-based membrane. These substrates are flexible, durable, environmentally friendly, etc. and are therefore suitable for existing printing technologies. The base components are then fabricated by printing several layers, of different materials, on top of each other. This is possible since the organic materials being used are dissolved in a solvent and can therefore be printed in the same way as any ordinary ink. A three dimensional object can be created using this method. Several different transistor models are presented in the thesis, the common denominator being, that they all have an ion-conducting insulator. The advantage with this, relatively rarely used, transistor model is that low-voltage electronics can fairly easily be fabricated. What makes our transistors stand out is that we are using environmentally friendly ion-conductors. As a result, our devices show both good electronic properties as well as being environmentally benign. We also present printed supercapacitors, an equivalent to re-chargeable batteries, fabricated on paper. The electrodes are made of activated carbon and we use the same environmentally friendly ion-conductors as in the transistors. Some of the more complicated electronics presented in this thesis are the five-staged ring-oscillator and the one-bit memory, constructed on a paper substrate.