A team of Swedish researchers at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm have made a breakthrough in transistor technology by creating the world’s first wooden electrochemical transistor.
Worlds First Wooden Transistor
The research paper titled Electrical current modulation in wood electrochemical transistors, shared by Tomshardware has shown of the creation of the first wooden electrochemical transistor which can reach speeds of 1 Mhz at a size of 3cm. Compared to the nanometer sizes and GHz speeds we see normally this does look very pathetic, But Isak Engquist senior associate professor at the Laboratory for Organic Electronics at Linköping University in a press release believes there is “huge development potential.”
How Does It Work?
I’m no expert on this and barely got out with a C in my three sciences at GCSE, but I’ll do my best to summarise the information. The transistor makes use of Balsa wood as it is grainless and evenly structured throughout as other woods that didn’t meet this criteria would stop functioning once the ions run out. The researchers removed the lignin which left only the long cellulose fibres with channels where the lignin had been. These channels were then filled with a conductive plastic, or polymer called PEDOT:PSS, which resulted in electrically conductive wood material. The image below shows the process.
Future Uses?
At the moment the researchers don’t have any specific applications in mind and they only did this because they could which is the scientific way of saying “We were bored”. There is definitely some potential in this but being an early technology it will need a lot more research to find out what that potential is.
