The interest in organic materials for optoelectronic device applications has undergone explosive growth in the last several years.  This growth has been propelled by exciting advances in organic thin films for displays, and for low cost electronic circuits.  With a few successful product introductions employing active electronic organic devices, it is possible that the "age of organic optoelectronics" has finally arrived.  This talk provides a review of the progress in such device technology, with an eye to the future which may include making active electronic devices with a single molecule. 

In particular, we discuss methods of growth of organic nanostructures with unusual optical and electronic properties.  We then discuss the nature of optical excited states in the organic structures and the phenomena and benefits of exciton confinement in very narrow regions.  Confinement of triplet and singlet excitons has been shown to dramatically increase the external emission efficiency of organic light emitting devices and the detection efficiency of organic photovoltaic cells.  Furthermore, multilayer organic nanostructure photodetectors are found to have very high frequency response with detection sensitivity in the visible spectral range.  Finally, we present some ideas on organic device fabrication enabling patterning of structures on the nanometer scale in both the vertical and horizontal directions.