New Technology

Wallpaper with changing designs, bulb-less lamps that shed light from their shades, mediaeval-looking scrolls that unroll to become flexible full-color displays… These are just a few of the new devices the approaching era of printed electronics could bring. In conventional electronics a lot of materiel and energy is wasted in the circuit configuration that carries the electricity. The new design is a polymer that can be printed out form a normal inkjet printer. This ink that is printed becomes the electric circuit where the electricity would light up and produce different colors of light. This is a less wasteful, flexible and a cheaper way to produce light. Polymer transistors, organic LED’s (OLED’s) and other printed components can already be combined to make displays, lights, sensors, and wireless electronic ID tags in companies. But much more is to come. “Printed electronics potentially has tremendous advantages in terms of costs – perhaps up to three orders of magnitude cheaper than silicon,” says Vivek Subramanian of the University of California at Berkeley. What’s more, when electronics are no longer rigid and delicate, it is possible to put them into entirely new places. Subramanian and colleagues are working on putting sensors inside wine bottles that radio the content’s chemical condition to the checkout. The flexible, thin displays that feature in the eBook readers made by Dutch firm Polymer Vision are another example. One version of the Readius prototype unrolls scroll-like from the cell phone-sized gadget, while another has a screen that, when not in use, is wrapped around the device. Impressive, but still only black and white, just like the upcoming printed eBook reader from Plastic Logic we wrote about recently. Similarly the exhibition of the latest printed electronics at the centre in Sedgefield was impressive, but also demonstrated there is clearly more development work to be done. I think that if they come up with a version that incorporates color ten then only thing that I have to say is “How much?”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 12th, 2009 at 10:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.