Dr M Raja and Dr D Donaghy
The UK has a number of internationally leading groups investigating the materials and designing electronic devices based on carbon-based materials, including diamond, diamond-like carbon and conjugated polymers. This proposal represents a national effort to address the most significant problems involved in progress towards their exploitation, and to produce devices using novel materials or combinations of materials. Carbon-based materials have the potential to make an impact on a range of applications ranging from general low-cost circuits and displays to power devices, microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) to supercapacitors, and sensors to solar cells and displays. It is valuable to bring together the main players in all aspects of carbon-based electronics into a single large consortium so that ideas and techniques which have been investigated in one carbon-based material can be used to address similar problems in another material and several carbon materials can be integrated into novel compound devices.
The partners were chosen because their expertise spans the full range of carbon-based materials and electronics. There are many common problems across the range of materials, in which the sharing of expertise in processing and characterisation techniques, and the design of devices, can give an added value for a wide-based consortium over smaller projects based on a single material. There is already an EPSRC-funded Research Network on diamond and diamond-like carbon (GR/N22946), coordinated by King's College London, and it was instrumental in setting up that side of this collaboration. However, the present project is much more than a network - it includes the sharing of facilities, expertise and techniques from one institution to another, across traditional demarcation lines between materials and academic disciplines.
The partners includes Bangor (electronic engineering), Bristol (chemistry), Cambridge (chemistry, engineering and physics), Heriot-Watt (chemistry and physics), Imperial College (physics and chemistry), King's College London (KCL) (physics), Liverpool (chemistry and electronic engineering), Oxford (chemistry), Surrey (electronic engineering), Sussex (chemistry) and University College London (UCL) (electronic engineering and physics). Interaction with industry is particularly strong: SMEs, chemical, equipment and electronics companies (many UK-based) are already collaborating with the proposers, as the letters of support will testify.
A large consortium including many of the internationally leading groups in carbon-based materials offers extraordinary opportunities. We do not wish to restrict our research to incremental improvement of devices that have already been envisaged, although improvement of the materials and the electronic design in order to fabricate enhanced devices has a major part in the proposal. We would also like to explore some intriguing possibilities of combinations of carbon-based materials and novel materials in order for the UK to leapfrog ahead of the international effort. Because of the large group of experts and the underpinning of the design of devices that we are confident of producing, we are also in the fortunate position of being able to include some quite speculative ideas for research in this proposal. Annex 1 summarises existing collaborations and new ones that will arise as a result of this project.
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