Organic thin film transistors have been fabricated on plastic substrates using a combination of two ultrathin insulating films, namely a 6 nm Al2O3 film (grown by UV-Ozone treatment of a pre-deposited aluminium film) and a 25 nm parylene C film deposited by vapour phase, as gate dielectric. They show a very low leakage current density, around 2 × 10−9 A/cm2, and, most importantly, can be operated at voltages below 1 V. We demonstrate that this low-cost technique is highly reproducible and represents a step forward for the routine fabrication of ultra-low voltage plastic electronics.

In the last four decades, substantial advances have been done in the understanding of the electrical behavior of excitable cells. From the introduction in the early 70's of the Ion Sensitive Field Effect Transistor (ISFET), a lot of effort has been put in the development of more and more performing transistor-based devices to reliably interface electrogenic cells such as, for example, cardiac myocytes and neurons. However, depending on the type of application, the electronic devices used to this aim face several problems like the intrinsic rigidity of the materials (associated with foreign body rejection reactions), lack of transparency and the presence of a reference electrode. Here, an innovative system based on a novel kind of organic thin film transistor (OTFT), called organic charge modulated FET (OCMFET), is proposed as a flexible, transparent, reference-less transducer of the electrical activity of electrogenic cells. The exploitation of organic electronics in interfacing the living matters will open up new perspectives in the electrophysiological field allowing us to head toward a modern era of flexible, reference-less and low cost probes with high-spatial and high-temporal resolution for a new generation of in-vitro and in-vivo monitoring platforms.