‘High Speed Response Organic Photodetectors with Cascade Buffer Layers,’ a paper describing the technology of significantly improving the function of the organic Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) sensor, jointly developed by Samsung R&D Institute Japan (SRJ) and Samsung Advanced Institute of Technology (SAIT), was selected as the inside front cover of Advanced Electronic Materials (Wiley).

Source: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/aelm.202270006
The front cover illustrates the reduction in image blurring phenomenon because the Hole Transport Layer (HTL), formed in a cascade, facilitates the movement of holes.

Advanced Electronic Materials is one of the journals of Wiley, a U.S. publisher with many excellent journals in science and engineering. Although the first issue of the journal was newly published in 2015, it is one of the journals with a rapidly increasing Impact Factor*, with many high-profile papers submitted in the field of electronic materials (materials science and physics) in recent years.

Organic CMOS image sensors are attracting significant attention of global major sensor manufacturers as a next-generation image sensor technology, because of its applicability to various sensor applications in terms of high resolution, high color purity reproducibility, and ease of Global Shutter application. The market size of Image sensor is expected to grow every year, and is said to reach 2.5 billion USD** by 2027.

Figure 1
a) Conceptual diagrams illustrating movie clips of moving subjects taken by image sensor based on single HTL OPD (upper) or two-layer cascade HTL
   OPD (lower). Imaging lag is suppressed by introducing cascade HTL.
b) Molecular structure of compounds applied to each layer of our OPDs. The Donor material applied to the Photoelectric Conversion Layer is a new
   material originally developed by SRJ/SAIT and submitted for publication earlier. ***
c) EQE spectra of single HTL OPD and two-layer cascade HTL OPD.

SRJ has been developing organic CMOS image sensors in collaboration with SAIT. And this time, authors succeeded in finding a new material and device structure that can dramatically improve the response speed, which is a weak point of organic CMOS sensors. This research result was published in Advanced Electronic Materials (Wiley Inc.). And we are honored that the concept image of this study was also accepted for the cover of the journal for the novelty of authors approach and the importance of the outcomes achieved.

(Authors of the paper from left)
Naotoshi Suganuma (SRJ), Chul-Joon Heo and Kyung-Bae Park (SAIT)