Next Chips: Organic Transistors and Memories and the Applications They Will Enable

The Second Coming of TFTs

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There is nothing especially new about the thin-film transistor (TFT). It was invented by O. Heil in 1935, although commercialization work didn’t begin until the 1960s at RCA Labs. Back then, TFTs competed for a brief period of time with what was to become the silicon semiconductor industry, but the invention of the MOSFET put pay to any grandiose ambitions that TFT manufacturers might have had in this regard. Instead, these manufacturers turned to a less ambitious goal; applications in LCD and electroluminescent displays. By the late 1980s silicon TFTs had become widely used in LCD displays.