“We thought, ‘Can we do it? Let’s do it, let’s put it out there to the scientific community and hope that someone else has something where they see these could actually be of use in reality.’”

“It was very curiosity-driven,” says Isak Engquist, a professor at Linköping University, in Sweden, who led the effort. While it may not be powering any wood-based supercomputers anytime soon, it does hold out promise for specialized applications including biodegradable computing and implanting into living plant material. The world’s first wooden transistor, made by a collaboration of researchers through the Wallenberg Wood Science Center and reported this week in Publications of the National Academy of Sciences, is 3 centimeters across and switches at less than one hertz.

Organic electrochemical transistors, made for biodegradable applications, are milimeters in size and switch at kilohertz rates. Transistors inside modern computer chips are several nanometers across, and switch on and off at hundreds of gigahertz.

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