A technology has been developed to make all polymer integrated circuits. It involves reproducible fabrication of field-effect transistors in which the semiconducting, conducting and insulating parts are all made of polymers. The fabrication on flexible substrates uses spin-coating of electrically active precursors and patternwise exposure of the deposited films. In the whole process stack integrity is maintained. Vertical interconnects are made mechanically. As a demonstrator functional 15-bit programmable code generators are fabricated. These circuits still operate when the foils are sharply bent. Due to the limited number of process steps the technology is potentially inexpensive.

In an attempt to improve on the properties of PEDOT (poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene)) as a stable, conducting, and transparent coating we synthesized four different alkoxy-substituted poly(thienylene−vinylene)s, 1−4, using the Stille coupling reaction. The oligomers and polymers obtained were characterized and their NIR−vis absorption spectra were measured as a function of doping, both electrochemically as films and chemically in solution. Similar spectra of PEDOT films were gathered for comparison. In PEDOT a change in doping level does not change the energies of the absorption bands, while for the other polymers the bands shift markedly and the NIR peak at high doping level lies at a higher energy. The polymers 1−4 are much less suited for the intended coatings than PEDOT. Possible reasons for this are discussed.

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