OVERVIEW

Organic materials have become quite widespread in electronic and optoelectronic applications for a variety of reasons that include lower costs, larger flexibility in designing materials with desired parameters, the possibility of fabricating circuit architectures and/or materials with parameters that are either better or different from those of semiconductor materials or heterostructures (see, for example, [1,2] and the references therein), and last, but not least, the possibility to fabricate electronic components such as thin-film transistors and ring oscillators on almost any substrate. The fabrication of such devices on flexible polyetherether ketone film and even on paper has been recently reported [3]. However, despite the number of published reports concerning organic nanoelectronic devices, they have not yet reached a breakthrough in applications, due, in part, to their general lower conductivity and mobility compared to semiconductor devices.

On the other hand, living cells face the same challenges as human technologies in that they must fabricate materials, convert, transmit, and make use of energy, generate motion, process and store information, and so on, based on principles that are sometimes totally different from the nanotechnologies and with goals that do not necessarily match those of humans. For example, the term "cost" certainly has a different meaning and the accuracy of cellular information processing is undoubtedly more important than speed. At the same time, the cell is not optimized for a specific function. Living cells have unique properties such as self-assembling, self-repairing, and self-replicating. Biomolecular responses are, in many cases, almost nondissipative and of a...