Fundamentals and Applications of Doped Organic Semiconductors (FADOS)

Research Project, 2025 – 2029

The possibility to control electronic properties through doping is a defining property of semiconductors. As the surge in interest in doped organic semiconductors over the last decade was mainly driven by an interest in thermoelectric applications, focus lay largely on optimizing steady-state electronic properties of bulk materials. Here, we target spatio-temporal control over doping and combine this with a holistic view of doping, exploring the relation between doping and ‘all’ material properties, including thermal, mechanical and biological aspects. Not only allows this to solve urgent problems (contact resistance), it also enables completely new (switchable, reconfigurable) devices.
The topic is inspired by a combination of scientific curiosity and a strong feeling of practical urgency, as reflected by the consortium composition of 8 universities, 4 research institutes and 4 companies. The latter jointly cover all major application areas of organic electronics, including light emission, photovoltaics, logic circuitry as well as instrumentation/modeling – each a multi-billion-euro market. The strong company involvement allows us to expose all doctoral candidates to academic and commercial working environments through a balanced secondment plan. Likewise, the training program complements the transfer of scientific skills (much beyond the specific topic, incl. open science) with personal and entrepreneurial skills, including communication to various audiences, career development, intellectual property and startup-founding, etc.
On short to intermediate time scales, the impact of FADOS will be to enhance European competitiveness in major, growing markets–and beautiful science. On longer time scales, we expect that FADOS will open new fields in which the unique possibilities of soft semiconductors in terms of solution-based local and dynamic tuning of (opto)electronic, thermal, mechanical and biological properties are explored for truly new and green functionalities.