An electrical switch made from conductive wood could become a building block for future electronic devices embedded within living trees and other plants.
made from semiconductor materials such as silicon. Each semiconductor transistor can switch on and off billions of times per second. Compared with silicon transistors, the wood transistors are significantly larger, each 3 centimetres long. They also have much slower switching speeds that only allow them to switch off in about 1 second, and to switch on in about 5 seconds.
The researchers demonstrated and measured the wood transistor’s operations during multiple switching test runs. This represents an “exciting engineering possibility for utilising wood” as a scaffold “that can incorporate electrical materials into devices”, saysThe team initially tried several types of wood, including birch and ash.