Polymers: conductors, insulators, and active devices

The discovery of new molecular organic materials for electroluminescent devices has allowed a wide variety of applications in displays, communications, sensors, and the like. The demonstration of organic magnetic materials has offered the challenge of finding polymer (organic) materials in which there is sufficient electronic exchange as well as stability both thermally and chemically. The intrinsically conductive and semiconductive polymers have offered flexibility and conductivity to meet needs from batteries to solar cells. This paper gives an update/overview of promising new complex polymer building blocks which can yield conductive, semiconductive, luminescent, ferro-, ferri-, and super-paramagnetic materials for devices of the future in power, storage, displays, and communications devices. The use of these materials to produce electrically active polymeric materials has given us freedom to fabricate devices with novel and useful properties.