Organic Electronics to the rescue

Organic electronics devices have recently attracted great attention because these offer several advantages such as simple device structure, potentially low cost, and low power consumption.

Researchers are currently working on egg white to build organic electronics as it’s easy to process. readily accessible and available at a lower price.

It is sometimes assumed that durability is the de-facto for a high-quality electronic system, but let us assess a situation where a microelectronic system that is used to deliver drugs to various parts of the body dissolved after their task is over.

The use of electronic devices has gone up exponentially and on average, almost 50 million metric tons of electronic waste is generated every year.

One way to lessen this problem is to use biological materials to build devices that are biodegradable and biocompatible. Using materials to build electronics would be environment-friendly because their ability to biodegrade would lead to less piling up of trash. Moreover, biodegradable materials are non-toxic. Biomaterials are already used as semi-organic field-effect transistors (BiOFETs), but these materials are not always easy to handle and may require many extraction steps.

Egg albumen can be a promising alternative to conventional silicon-based non-volatile memory systems. It may also have potential applications in the imitation of biological memory behavior, artificial intelligence, and brain-like intelligence because of the good compatibility.

Organic electronics

Organic-based optoelectronic and electronic devices have recently attracted great attention because of their potential applications on lighting systems, flat panel displays, backlighting modules, radio frequency identification tags. flexible sensors, and flexible displays.

The advantages they offer are:

• simple device structure
• favorable scalability
• potential low cost
• low power consumption
• multiple state property
• three-dimensional stacking capability

Previous reports have suggested several promising biomaterials to prepare organic-based electronic and optoelectronic devices with deoxyribonucleic acid that can serve as excellent electron-blocking layers in both green and blue organic light-emitting diodes.

They also can be used for non-volatile transistor memory and write-once read-many-times memory applications. Researchers have also tried different bio-materials like tobacco, mosaic, virus, cysteine, ferritin protein, and enzymes to fabricate memory devices with various novel structures.

A number of protein-based materials have successfully been utilized to fabricate resistive-type memories. for instance, the cationic poly (allylamine hydrochloride) (PAH)/ferritin nanoparticle multilayer structure is prepared via a layer-by-layer structure, which has a reliable switching property.

As there are two sides to a coin, there are some downsides to this too, such as it involves complicated chemical processes, such as extraction or purification, which inevitably increase fabrication cost and method complexity.

To overcome many of such problems with the fabrication of biomaterials, researchers have come with the idea of fabricating and characterizing non-volatile resistive switching memory devices by utilizing chicken egg albumin without additional purification or extraction, the proposed devices feature a simpler fabrication process as well as superior switching properties and reliability compared with most previous approaches.

Researchers have used cellulose as a dielectric layer in an inverter circuit and shellac as a dielectric in OFETs. Some other dielectrics with more exotic properties like hydrophobicity are also made from beeswax and carnauba wax. they are also exploring building OFETs in hard gelatin capsules or on caramelized sugar for biomedical applications. The next step is 3D-printable gelatins that could be used to make circuits for sensors that are edible.

Egg-based Electronics

The new research makes that egg albumen can be used to make resistive memories that can operate based on changes in resistance rather than electric-current as a next-generation alternative to the silicon-based memories that dominate today’s electronics. These resistive memories will have potential advantages such as higher speeds, higher densities, and smaller sizes.

Scientists have found that on mixing egg albumen with hydrogen peroxide, a series of chemical reactions occur that transform the biomaterial into an active film useful to make transparent, flexible resistive memory devices.

These newer forms of technology can be a game-changer when it comes to sustainable forms of electronic devices. The advent of neural links and other similar innovations in the biotechnological field would definitely see exponential growth in the near future.