UK in plastic electronics drive (BBC)

[eppur_se_muova]

UK firm Plastic Logic has said it will build the world's first factory to produce plastic electronic devices.

The Cambridge-based company has secured $100m (£50.6m) venture capital funding for the German plant.

Once built it will manufacture circuits crucial for the development of novel gadgets such as electronic paper.

Unlike silicon, plastic circuits can be made using simple printing techniques and could dramatically reduce the price of consumer electronic goods.
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Plastic Logic is a spin out from Cambridge University and has been developing plastic electronic devices since 2000.
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/6227575.stm



Q&A: Plastic electronics

British firm Plastic Logic has announced that it will build the world's first factory to manufacture plastic electronic circuits.

What are plastic electronics?

Plastic electronics is a branch of electronics that deals with devices made from organic polymers, or conductive plastics, as opposed to silicon.

Organic polymers are a class of substances that are used to make everything from bin bags to solar panels.

The highly conductive polymers needed for electronic devices were first discovered in the early 1960s. They are already used in some electronic devices.

In 2004, electronics giant Philips announced a concept flexible display, while other companies such as Cambridge Display Technology use them to manufacture organic light-emitting diodes (LEDs).
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more: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6227455.stm

[Duer 157099]

1. This sounds important

The move from inorganic (silicon) to organic (carbon) is a fundamental shift, and reminds me of the sci-fi scenarios such as in The Terminator or The Matrix -- where artificial intelligence takes over -- except in those cases the AI was inorganic. If AI is organic, it makes the whole question of what "life" is that much more murky...

[TechBear_Seattle]

2. How expensive will it be to recycle them?

Because of the several metals used, current electronic components are very expensive to recycle, even when recycling is possible (it often times isn't.) If plastic components are easier to handle, then I'm all for them.

[eppur_se_muova]

4. The actual semiconductors should make up very little of the mass ...

the main body (the "substrate") is PETE, polyethylene terephthalate, used to make recyclable soda bottles. Recycling the circuit components would be like trying to recycle the ink from newspapers -- they will probably wind up as leftover gunk to be incinerated. Fortunately, they are made without heavy metals, though some of them may *eventually* contain selenium, which is mildly toxic, but recoverable by stack scrubbers. Mostly the components contain carbon and hydrogen, with some sulfur, with other elements sometimes required for dopants.

BTW, that silvery "metal" film you see coating anti-static bags for computer components is polyacetylene, an organic conductor. It's also a component of some batteries.

[Lisa]

12. cool! Thanks for the info!

I didn't know that, about the anti-static coating. And as for the semiconductors -- I've recently gotten interested in industrial ecology and lifecycle analysis, so the part about cutting out the heavy metals sounds good to me. One of my co-workers is doing a graduate thesis on hazardous materials in e-waste, and their release during disposal or recycling.

[Book Lover]

3. This will bring epaper out of the stratosphere and into actual production

I literally tremble with delight at the possibility that epaper will come into full production during my lifetime. It will be the greatest fundamental shift in the art, craft, science, and engineering of all printed products since ... hell, since we first pounded papyrus reeds.

[TechBear_Seattle]

5. The problem with epaper is...

Where would we be if the Dead Sea Scrolls had been stored in electronic format? Would we have been able to retrieve the information? What if the Pyramid Texts were composed and saved as a stream of on/off bits, is there any likelihood we could have learned to read them?

Once we give up the creation of artifacts that can be read by a non-technical culture, or a culture using technology different from our own, we give up our entire posterity.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. That is something to think about, but ...

Where would we be if we tried to print out all of our information on paper or similar media? We would exhaust the resources of the planet. We have to decide what is "keeper" information, and what is not.

Information which is perceived as deeply important will be preserved by a variety of methods, low and high tech, and recopied into new formats as they emerge. Spam email will not.

Have you ever seen the originial Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution? Both are fading out, and virtually unreadable. But duplicates abound, many in printed or even engraved form. Some would surely survive almost any cataclysmic end of civilization.

There is already a large mass of data from the early days of the computer industry which is essentially nonrecoverable because the formatting information was not preserved. For that matter, there are even some old sound recordings (on wax cyclinders) which are similarly uninterpretable. One could argue that it probably wasn't terribly important information, or more effort would have been made to preserve it. Obviously that can't always be true, but statistically, it probably is.

[TechBear_Seattle]

9. I'm not saying you are wrong, but consider:

The vast majority of first hand sources on the Sumerians, Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Han, Phonecians, and many other ancient cultures is in the form of prescriptions, shopping lists, cargo manifests, student writing excercises, grafitti, prayers that had been written down and left at shrines and hundreds of other routine notes.

I understand the desire and need to switch towards electronic media for these sorts of things. That doesn't mean I can't mourn the legacy that we, unlike our ancestors, will not be leaving behind.

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Quite true. Archeologists browse other people's garbage, after all.

Much of what is preserved is info that no one really intended to preserve beyond their own use; only accident selected what was preserved and what was not.

If it will cheer you up, consider this: the overwhelming majority of written records prior to the printing press have probably been lost, because so few existed in more than one copy. Electronic documents are so cheap and easy to duplicate that any important document is probably *more* likely to survive by existing in multiple copies. It is increasingly difficult to lose information, even deliberately -- look at all the embarassing statements that politicians (especially Repugs) have claimed they didn't make, that were quickly dug out of Web-based archives to prove them liars!

I worry more about the possibility that information will survive, but be so mixed with noise (or incorrect/irrelevant info) that it will be hard to be sure what is true and what isn't. Look at the controversy around politically-motivated editing of Wikipedia entries, and think what could happen if software agents could be programmed to wreak similar corruption. And it could just be so hard to unravel that the real story is in effect lost, despite all the actual records being preserved. Mere media won't prevent that.

[Book Lover]

8. Epaper is bigger than that

Firstly, I freely agree with your point: that data stored in such manner which requires a technological product to retrieve is in danger of a very short shelf life. The best way to write something down permanently, and I do mean permanently, is to carve it in stone.

I am not, however, worried that important texts will be e-only. Epaper is a new medium, not one that will supplant the old. Hell, I still use papyrus in some of my work, for instance. And oak-gall ink on occasion.

But think about the world where you don't have to recycle newspapers, because you can download the content onto your enewspaper device, which will be as light as and the same size as your current newspaper. Or the world where you have one book device that contains your entire library. Of course people want to have a heavy book to hold - I repair those all the time. That market will never go away. But for those people who buy romance books one-a-week and then toss them away - epaper is a great solution. Or how about the textbook and reference book markets? You want the new edition of Webster's? You would have the option of downloading the new text to your device as well as buying a new book.

[Trajan]

7. Questions about characteristics ....

Are these analog, digital or either/both ? ...

Can they saturate and/or cutoff ? .... storage time ? .... slew rate ? ....

What is the fastest clock that has been operated using this technology ?

[eppur_se_muova]

10. Details not given in the article. There are several different types of ...

organic semiconductor technology in development, so probably no single answer. Try googling "organic transistor" -- lots of hits, minimal false hits. (Also OFET, OLED.)

The article does mention that the smallest components which can be printed are thousands of times larger than the best silicon photolithographic components, so I would assume thousands of times slower, but don't have a number.

Background: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_semiconductor , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conductive_polymers