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ORGANIC SEMICONDUCTORS

Beyond 100% doping efficiency

Nature Materials volume 18, pages 93–94 (2019)Cite this article

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A single dopant molecule can exchange more than one charge with the hosting polymer semiconductor, doubling the maximum doping efficiency achievable.

Adding impurities to semiconductors to control their electronic properties — a process known as doping — is a key ingredient that contributed to the rapid development of integrated circuits in the past few decades. In fact, most of the electronic and optoelectronic devices based on inorganic or organic materials, from silicon-based transistors to organic light-emitting diodes (OLEDs)1, rely on stacks of materials having an excess of negative or positive charges (called n- and p-doped materials, respectively) to optimize their performance. When doping inorganic and organic semiconductors, both seem to follow very similar fundamental principles, but are remarkably different in their microscopic details. One of the most impressive consequences of such differences is now described in a recent Article by David Kiefer and co-workers2 in Nature Materials: in organic semiconductors, a single dopant (the impurity added to the material) can contribute more than one charge carrier to the host semiconductor, reaching a doping efficiency higher than 100%.

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Fig. 1: Double p-doping.

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  1. Physics Department, Kent State University, Kent, OH, USA

    Björn Lüssem

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  1. Björn Lüssem
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Correspondence to Björn Lüssem.

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Lüssem, B. Beyond 100% doping efficiency. Nature Mater 18, 93–94 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-018-0266-3

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