Jump to navigation Plastic Chips: They can endow just about anything with computer smarts -- and they'll be cheap
Displays, though, barely scratch the surface of what's coming in plastic electronics. A typical home probably has only a handful of displays, but it has hundreds of food containers, toys, medicine bottles, and other items, each of which could be endowed with a modicum of computer smarts if brittle and costly silicon and glass can be replaced with plastic. With the advent of cheap plastic circuits, food packages could sport a "sell by" imprint that keeps track of time and turns bright red when the limit is reached.
Moreover, in a world of polymer electronics, virtually any company could become a chipmaker. Thanks to inks made from conductive and semiconductive polymers, it will soon be possible to print proletarian circuits on almost any surface using an inkjet printer or offset press. A billion-dollar semiconductor factory isn't needed
Polymer Electronics can't challenge silicon in heavy-duty number-crunching jobs now, although that may be just a matter of time. Plastic transistors today are positively poky compared with silicon versions. But the speed of poly transistors has been rising steadily. Every improvement expands the potential market.
How much might the poly-chip market be worth? Motorola Inc. sees an opportunity for new applications that could reach as much as $300 billion ultimately -- more than double the total worldwide sales of silicon chips last year. Since plastic chips would cost a fraction of silicon-chip prices, hitting that target would take many times the 100 billion silicon chips cranked out last year. So Motorola is working to develop printing methods that could spew out flexible plastic circuits like so much newspaper, at perhaps 300 feet per minute.
The final result, predicts Occhipinti, will be "ambient intelligence." Cheap chips will be everywhere, even on the surface of textile fibers, wirelessly jabbering back and forth. "Things that think," he adds, will be "truly ubiquitous."
Only plastic chips can be cheap enough to make this happen. There's a limit on how small, and hence cheap, silicon chips can get -- 5 cents to 10 cents is considered rock bottom. But even that's too expensive
Moletronics probably won't be a viable contender for silicon's crown until after 2010, says Bell Labs's Reichmanis. By then, you may read the news on thin, flexible screens that unroll like window shades. Some plastic displays -- alternatives to OLEDs -- are already moving into the commercial arena. One closely watched technology is "electronic paper," developed by E Ink.
The first consumer product is an electronic book that Sony and Royal Philips Electronics have just launched in Japan. The size of a thin book, it opens to reveal a paperlike, black-and-white screen that changes the text from page to page by rotating its tiny pixel balls, each of which is half black, half white. Behind the screen is enough memory to store an entire library of 500 digital books.
from Businessweek
