Soft Electronics Lab

The Soft Electronics Lab contains a wide variety of equipment and materials, providing students an environment that is unique amongst the ECE department's teaching labs. A ductless fumehood and nitrogen glovebox provide students with a safe and clean environment for lab activities, and additional equipment and materials - including spectrometers and photodetectors - allow students to understand and work with the properties and fabrication of organic electronic and liquid-crystal devices.

Classes in this lab focus on the field of "soft" electronics, organic or condensed-matter materials that have grown to become a core technology of an increasing number of modern consumer products. The development of these courses and their course materials, procedures, and required lab equipment has been supported by a sponsored research grant funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under the Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) program.

Lab Schedule

The schedule is subject to change at anytime, so check back often. To schedule this lab, email ecehelp@ncsu.edu.

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Course Information

The Soft Electronics Lab is principally used for the Organic Electronics and Liquid Crystal Displays course, which is provided at both the undergraduate and graduate level. This course introduces students to concepts and common organic devices found within soft electronics, and addresses their differences in fabrication and physical properties versus more traditional solid-state devices. Topics include electronic transport and light emission, self-assembly and partial-order, lightwave propagation, and fabrication.

Additionally, lab activities are designed to give students hands-on experience with organic electronic materials and liquid crystal display technology, and primarily focus on the fabrication and characterization of four devices:

a single-pixel liquid crystal display (LCD),
an organic light-emitting diode (OLED),
an organic photovoltaic (OPV) solar cell,
and a polymer field-effect transistor (pFET, or organic thin-film transistor, OTFT)

Equipment

Number of Computers: 2		Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Enterprise
Model: Dell Optiplex 990		Processor: Pentium Core i7 3.1 GHz		RAM: 4096