University of
Tokyo is showing its flexible contact scanner (EW 08/09/04) at the
International Electron Devices Meeting in San Francisco today.
It is "a flexible,
organic image scanner which you can simply lay on a piece of text
in order to take an image of the text", researcher Takao Someya of
Tokyo's Quantum Phase Electronics Center, told Electronics
Weekly. "The scanner is a thin, flexible sheet of plastic
containing image sensors."
Each pixel in the
device consists of an organic transistor and organic photodetector
with an effective sensing area of 50x50µm and the 0.4mm thick
imager has a 50x50mm sensing area and resolution of 36 dots per
inch (dpi) "with the potential to go up to 250 dpi", said
Someya.
The photodetectors
distinguish between black and white by sensing the difference in
reflected light from black and white parts of an image.
Its thin-film
pentacene transistors have 18µm channel lengths and electron
mobilities of 0.7cm²/Vs.
The IEDM
presentation: 'A Large-Area, Flexible and Lightweight Sheet Image
Scanner Integrated With Organic Field-Effect Transistors and
Organic Photodiodes', will describe the device in detail.