Assessing Edible Semiconductors for Future Edible Electronics

Edible Electronics [1] is an emerging field targeting devices and sensors that can be safely ingested without need of supervision nor recollection, and are degraded within the body after performing their function. Final applications are both in the healthcare, in forms of smart pills which are not simply ingestible but are also digestible, and in the food sector, offering safe direct tagging of food. For future edible electronic systems, active circuits will be required, both for logic and control. To this end, one of the main challenges is the development of transistors based on edible semiconductors with sufficient performance to be adopted in such systems. Here we report on our recent progress on reassessing carotenoids semiconductors, mainly beta-carotene, for thin films in transistors. By careful processing and microstructuring of films, a maximum field-effect mobility exceeding 10^-2 cm²/Vs was achieved, with reasonable stability in dark-conditions. At the same time, we report on the integration of commonly ingested organic dyes in fully edible transistors architectures. Such results indicate that options for edible semiconductors are available and can be exploited towards first integrated edible logic circuits.<br/> <br/>[1] AS Sharova, F Melloni, G Lanzani, CJ Bettinger, M Caironi, “<i>Edible electronics: The vision and the challenge</i>” Advanced Materials Technologies 6 (2), 2000757