Apr 19, 2001
That's the kind of prediction often made by futurists who say that as integrated circuits become cheaper and smarter, they will be incorporated into everyday consumer products--even frozen food boxes. Researchers at Schaumburg-based Motorola Corp. are teaming with colleagues at Xerox Corp. and Dow Chemical Co. to develop technology to make it happen.
The Motorola-led partnership aims to develop processes that will churn out integrated circuits made from plastic--and print those chips about as cheaply and abundantly as the equipment that printsnewspapers.
Indeed, the team recently won a federal grant of $7.85 million to help finance its research, intended to produce commercially viable products within four years.
Making transistors and other computer chip semiconductor components out of plastic has been accomplished in several labs, but no one has yet produced commercial products using the technique, said researchers at Motorola labs in Schaumburg.
"Some European companies have reported making organic electronic materials, but they're working with deposition techniques that operate in a vacuum," said Dan Gamota, Motorola's manager of organic electronic technologies. "This is a relatively complex, expensive process.
"Our goal is to use printing presses--doing everything as inexpensively as possible--to make low-cost organic transistors."
The effort is but a tiny sliver of Motorola's overall $7.8 billion semiconductor business, which makes chips that power electronic devices from desktop computers to wireless phones and pagers.
Yet Motorola researchers are intrigued by the potential. The firm has been working to find new fields to pioneer and dominate much as it did with mobile communications almost two decades ago. The new enterprises range from biochips to smart cards; their common bond is adapting cheap information technology to new applications.
Dow and Xerox have expertise in materials science and printing technologies that complement Motorola's electronics design skills, Gamota said.
While plastic integrated circuits aren't expected to compute as fast as silicon chips because they are less complex,they still may be useful if they can be made cheaply enough, said Marc Chason, director of Motorola's manufacturing core technologies lab.
"We look at this as a disruptive technology," said Chason. "It won't replace silicon across the board, but it will where using silicon is overkill."
Plastic semiconductors might one day find a home in liquid crystal displays and smart cards, he said.
And if they can be made using printing technology, the semiconductors could be incorporated into the packaging of everyday products.
Enabled by a chip, for example, the packaging from a frozen pot pie could "tell" a smart refrigerator when the pie was removed so the appliance could keep the inventory needed to restock a family's food supply.
The same packaging circuitry could program the microwave to cook the pot pie at the optimal power level and time.
This technology could be incorporated into so-called electronic paper, which would combine the characteristics of a flat-panel electronic display with paper.
Researchers at Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center who have teamed up with Motorola envision a marriage of electronics with paper that would enable people to enjoy computer technology while using familiar devices like pens and paper rather than electronic gadgetry.
"We view this technology as an enabler for such applications," Chason said. "This material would look like ink on paper but would have the flexibility of an electronic display."
