An 18-year-old Surrey school student has co-authored a paper investigating components that could be important for the future of flexible electronics.

This follows his study of source gated transistors (SGTs), which are an energy-efficient alternative to traditional transistors; and while their ‘usability’ has been questioned due to some self-heating effects, the new research — presented at the British Science Festival and published in Scientific Reports — shows that these effects are minimal.

SGTs are more energy-efficient and more electrically robust than traditional transistors, which are the fundamental building blocks of many electronic devices (for example, they allow the control of colour and brightness in
the pixels on a screen). However, it had been thought that their self-heating would lead to device failures.

Thomas Burridge, the sixth-form student who co-authored the paper during a placement with the University of Surrey (www.surrey.ac.uk) last summer, wrote computer code to simulate SGTs self-heating and processed the results, subsequently checking them against data from real experiments.

He found that simple design changes to the geometry of the SGT all but eliminated self-heating and its damaging effects. This year, he is going on to study engineering at the University of Cambridge.

Dr Radu Sporea — Mr Burridge’s supervisor and a research fellow at the University of Surrey — said: “When you set the students a task, you never tell them that this is something that no-one has ever tackled before. Clothing, sensors and displays could benefit from this development, making wearable technology and flexible screens a reality.

"I don't think we’ve found the true ‘killer’ application for this technology, but the potential is immense because SGTs could be economic, robust, lightweight — and we can manufacture vast amounts of them in a similar way to newspapers being printed in a paper press.”