Transparent Success in CMOS Inverter A TV screen appears from a plain wall with a push of button on remote controller. It is a transparent LCD screen, and what we see before turning on the TV is a regular wallpaper behind the screen. Experts are estimating that by around 2020s this kind of ‘transparent’ TV will developed. Transparent TV is not just remain a dream if microelectronic circuits and transistors as well as LCD become transparent. To bring it into reality, transparent transistors are the most crucial factor. A team of researchers led by Professor Im Seong-il made a breakthrough in making a transparent transistor for the first time in the world. The transparent transistor can be used in CPU, one of the core parts of electronics. A paper regarding the outcome of their research was published as a cover paper of Advanced Functional Materials, the most popular academic journal in materials engineering, on 10 March. If televisions using transparent transistors produced for commercial use, walls can be changed into TV screen, the screen will seem just like an ordinary wall, and turn into a TV screen when it is turned on. Complementary Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor (CMOS) inverter device is an important and essential unit composed of p-channel and n-channel transistors that are serially connected to function as logic device and amplifier. Usual CMOS device needs silicon which provides fast transistor action but is opaque. Transparent CMOS inverter could not be realized but would be fantastic if realized on glass. Professor Seongil Im and his Ph.D student Min Suk Oh in the department of physics (BK21 Institute of Physics and Applied Physics) recently succeeded in the fabrication of the transparent, see-through CMOS inverter on glass for the first time in the world. Advanced Functional Materials, one of the best journals in the field of Materials Science and Applied Physics took his research results as a cover paper for the March issue (title: "Transparent Photo-Stable Complementary Inverter with an Organic/Inorganic Nanohybrid Dielectric Layer") rephrasing the results as follows: "Seongil Im and co-workers describe the fabrication of a transparent complementary thin-film transistor inverter with a ZnO top gate and bottom gate of pentacene channels. "Twelve nanometer-thin organic-inorganic hybrid dielectric layers with high capacitance are adopted to allow the ZnO and pentacene transistors to operate under only 3 V, and the inverter action appears very stable even under a few mW of white light. This discovery could herald the arrival of a new type of transparent logic device". Based on this success, transparent display TV and transparent integrated circuits (IC) even come closer to human life. "Well, ubiquitous era is surely dawning," Prof. Im said. "How slow are our transistors! See, people like something fancy".