ageing electronics

From issue 2632 of New Scientist magazine, 02 December 2007, page 27

found on: technology.newscientist.com

Ageing may be as important to electronics as it is to good wine. A plastic transistor doubles its performance if simply left to sit at room temperature for a week.
Cheap to mould, pentacene transistors are a promising candidate for organic electronics. However, when they are being built, molecules can misalign to form defects, which trap electrons and slow the transistors down.
Now Wolfgang Kalb's team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich has found that if a newly made pentacene transistor is left to sit in a vacuum, the defects disappear naturally (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.1457).
Self-healing typically requires heat, but in pentacene the "jostling" between molecules that occurs at room temperature is enough to realign the molecules and remove the defects.