Published in Horizon, 17 Mar 2014
A new type of plastic electronics made from organic materials is lighter, cheaper, and more flexible than any of today’s technology. Such circuits could be worn on clothing or placed inside medical sensors.
Electronic components such as transistors form the backbone of all modern computers, whether they are laptops, tablets, or smartphones. Today they are almost exclusively made from silicon, a widely available semiconductor.
But silicon has its drawbacks: it is opaque, almost always rigid, and has to be manufactured in individual sheets. If electronics could instead be made from organic materials – those such as plastic that contain chains of carbon atoms – it could be transparent, physically flexible, and fabricated continuously on a roll. […]
The rest of this article is available here.