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Updated: Dec 15, 2025

Translating Extracellular Electron Transfer Activities with Organic Electrochemical Transistors
Published on: January 31, 2025
Organic Electrochemical Transistors Based on the Conjugated Polyelectrolyte PCPDTBT-SO3 K (CPE-K)
Alexander T Lill1, David X Cao1, Max Schrock1
1Center for Polymers and Organic Solids, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA.
Abstract:
PCPDTBT-SO3 K (CPE-K), a conjugated polyelectrolyte, is presented as a mixed conductor material that can be used to fabricate high transconductance accumulation mode organic electrochemical transistors (OECTs). OECTs are utilized in a wide range of applications such as analyte detection, neural interfacing, impedance sensing, and neuromorphic computing. The use of interdigitated contacts to enable high transconductance in a relatively small device area in comparison to standard contacts is demonstrated. Such characteristics are highly desired in applications such as neural-activity sensing, where the device area must be minimized to reduce invasiveness. The physical and electrical properties of CPE-K are fully characterized to allow a direct comparison to other top performing OECT materials. CPE-K demonstrates an electrical performance that is among the best reported in the literature for OECT materials. In addition, CPE-K OECTs operate in the accumulation mode, which allows for much lower energy consumption in comparison to commonly used depletion mode devices.
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