Special Section on Towards the Realization of Organic Molecular Electronics

Research of organic molecular electronics has a long history and has developed through several steps of progress. For example, the idea of “molecular electronic devices” was proposed more than 20 years ago and continuous researches have been conducting by many scientists to realize practical applications of the organic molecular devices for cultivating a new era of devices. However, wide applications of molecular devices have not been attained yet. Several reasons being considered to explain this situation, one of which may be that much progress of so called “microelectronic technologies” has been attained in this period and it has been supporting long time the highly advancing technological and information society. However, the microelectronic technologies are recently facing very fundamental physical, chemical and materials limitations in terms of operation speed, integration and sensitivity. In order to overcome these difficulties, again the organic molecular devices attract much attention as the most essential technologies in the next generation society. In fact, recent progress on molecular electronic technologies is remarkable and, for example, made it possible to utilize even a single molecular device.