Lowcost flexible fabrication

About This Video

So we need to change completely the system of our fabrication. We need to use other materials, other machines, other processes to create electronics on plastic. Ideally that can withstand low temperatures. So we talk about plastic electronics, but we can also call them printed electronics or flexible or solution processed in the sense that the materials that we're putting down are now put down at very low temperatures in the form of things like inks, pastes and gels by printing, stamping or even spraying. So this is extremely low cost fabrication at low temperatures for future electronics. And there are of course advantages, things like cost. and area. You can do this on a vast area without having a large production machine. You can do it a bit like you print newspapers and magazines. And of course you can print a lot of them. The point is that soon enough we should be able to print electronics on flexible plastic at the same speed as we print Hello magazine. However, there are downsides. The biggest downside really is the speed. And by this I mean the speed of our circuits. So the problem here is that the materials that we use, the semiconductors that we now use in the place of silicon are now a thousand to a million times less able to pass current. So the transistors that we're making and the circuits that we're making are going to be slower by the same amount. And yield is a problem. If you're using these very fast production techniques, a lot of the time