Conducting plastics have long been a bit of a tease. Depending on their makeup, they can carry a current freely like metals or switch on and off like semiconductors. But when it comes to making transistors and other electronic devices, semiconducting plastics have been slowpokes. Even amorphous silicon, the low-grade silicon used to make the transistor arrays that drive liquid crystal displays, whisks electrical charges along almost an order of magnitude faster than semiconducting plastics do. That's a major reason plastics haven't dethroned amorphous silicon in large-scale applications. But new work from researchers in the United Kingdom and the United States could change all that.
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