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Plastic may spell the end of the silicon microchip

Plastic won't spell the end of silicon, but it will offer a lower-cost alternative in many applications. From the article:

The initial products from the factory will be pieces of plastic about A4 size. The basic plastic substrate will be polyethylene terephthalate, a form of plastic used to make drinks bottles.

“I would not be surprised if Prof Sirringhaus gets a Nobel prize for his achievements in this technology,” says Mr Hauser.

By 2009 the Dresden plant should be producing 2.2m units of A4-size semiconductor sheets a year. They will initially be used as flexible “control circuitry” for large displays the size of a piece of paper that can hold large amounts of information – equivalent to thousands of books.

The displays will most likely be made by other electronics companies, with Plastic Logic providing the crucial control circuitry and possibly licensing its designs.

Mr Hauser adds: “We hope to make it as easy to carry around large amounts of written information using devices based on our technology as it is now to have easy access to large amounts of music using an iPod or MP3 player.”

The distances between adjacent circuitry lines in the plastic semiconductors due to be made in Dresden will be 5-10 micrometres (5-10 millionths of a metre) which is a lot higher than the nanometre (billionths of a metre) dimensions of the latest silicon semiconductors.

But under development in Plastic Logic’s research operations are plastic circuits that are just 60 nanometres in dimension, says John Mills, chief executive officer, holding out the possibility that before long the electronic characteristics of the company’s plastic devices might not be too different from those of conventional silicon chips.

At that point, says Mr Hauser, the world may be ready to embrace a new form of microchip – based on the A4 sheets due to emerge from the Dresden plant but a lot smaller – that could be cheap enough to do jobs for which current silicon devices are too expensive.

For instance, the chips could form part of cheap toys that tell children how they are to be used or, depending on how they are programmed, remind them to do their homework. “Plastic electronics could lead to a fundamental revolution in the way the electronics industry evolves”, says Mr Hauser.

Developments like these will also lower the cost of robots, and make them more powerful in their thinking.