Creating cellulose transistors for biosensing, high-speed applications
Creating cellulose transistors for biosensing, high-speed applications lead image
The transistor is one of the most fundamental building blocks of modern electronics, underpinning every computer, smartphone, and server farm. Most transistors are made of silicon or germanium, although some modern transistors are composed of organic polymer semiconductors.
Fukuhara et al. designed and built a Schottky gated field-effect transistor using cellulose nanoparticles, demonstrating the first example of a transistor made from plant-derived materials.
Cellulose is an extremely common organic compound, produced naturally by most plants. This makes it an important carbon-neutral material in a world increasingly affected by climate change. Its properties make it an ideal semiconductor material for biocompatible applications.
“Cellulose is a light, renewable material that has better affinity with living organisms than conventional artificial semiconductor materials, so it is likely to find great application as a new biosensor,” said author Mikio Fukuhara. “Because the energy gap and voltage resistance are large and the on/off ratio is relatively large, it may also be used in high-speed applications and light-related fields.”
Cellulose is an intrinsic semiconductor, which means other elements cannot be introduced into the material to change its gap energy. However, the structure of the cellulose molecules can be altered by adding functional groups, allowing the researchers to tailor the bandgap of their transistor.
They also determined that the conventional nanofiber structure of cellulose lacked the required density to make a transistor, so they instead used amorphous cellulose nanoparticles containing short-axis cellulose fibers.
The authors plan to continue their research by evaluating different species of plants to identify the best candidates for mass-producing cellulose with the desired characteristics.
Source: “Characteristics of Schottky gated field̶ effect transistors utilizing cellulose nanoparticles,” by Mikio Fukuhara, Tomonori Yokotsuka, Tetsuo Samoto, Takahito Ono, Nobuhisa Fujima, and Toshiyuki Hashida, AIP Advances (2025). The article can be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1063/5.0279007 .
