Preface: phys. stat. sol. (a) 205/3
Authors: Wöll Christof 
Published: March 2008

Presently, plastic electronics is attracting a significant amount of scientific as well as commercial attention. 60 years after its first introduction, silicon still outperforms all other materials when it comes to fabricating electronic devices, but organic semiconductors – both polymers and smaller molecules (oligomers) – have significant advantages when it comes to cost efficiency. Although these soft materials cannot compete with silicon with regard to the switching speed or current density, the prospect of being able to print flexible electronic circuits on mass products has triggered research and development projects in many companies. In optoelectronics, molecule‐based devices have reached the market; organic light‐emitting diodes (OLEDs) already show the time and the calling phone‐number on many mobile phones. Another product line, large OLED‐based video (or TV) screens, are available as prototypes and are about to reach the customers.

The use of organic materials as active semiconductors in transistors for switching, amplifying and computing is still in its infancy, but here also demonstrations are available and the first commercial applications have been announced. For the production of smart tags, in particular in connection with radio‐frequency identification (RFID), organic field‐effect transistors (OFETs) have already been successfully fabricated using organic thin film technology.

Researchers in the field of organic electronics are motivated by a number of different goals, such as the understanding of the rather different physics governing charge transport in an organic material, the unraveling of the basic principles of organic thin film deposition on solid substrates, gaining insight into fundamental aspects of charge injection from metals into organic materials, and meeting the engineering challenge of fabricating functioning devices.

This Special Issue of physica status solidi contains a collection of articles describing the state‐of‐the‐art in organic electronics in the form of Feature Articles and Original Papers which present recent and new results together with a brief overview of other activities in the respective topical area.

The results reported in this issue have to a large extent been obtained in the framework of a national research program funded by the German science foundation, DFG, in the framework of a national focus research program (SPP 1121) over the last 7 years. The contributions cover all aspects of the topic, ranging from fundamental problems in the deposition and growth of organic thin films with high structural quality via basic aspects of charge transport in organic semiconductors to the manufacturing of real, organic based electronic devices and to questions related to aging and performance degradation.

The highly interdisciplinary character of this still rather new and quickly developing field is reflected by the fact that the authors come from very different subject areas, including chemistry, physics, and material science as well as engineering.

The editor would like to thank all authors for providing the manuscripts according to the deadlines, which were rather tight. We also would like to point out that this effort would not have been possible without the expertise of the pss staff. We thank in particular Sabine Bahrs and Stefan Hildebrandt for their continuous support. (© 2008 WILEY‐VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim)