Plastic electronics will change the design of familiar things.

A group of scientists led by Professor Henning Sirringhaus from the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge has developed a new process technology for printing electrical circuits on plastic. This brings us closer to the time when each of us can print the desired chip at home, and transparent “smart” materials such as artificial leather will enter everyday life.



By “artificial leather” they mean a surface that can perceive and process information — the temperature of an object, the texture of a surface, etc. The robot manipulators are an ideal application for it, but such materials can also be used in other areas: for RFID tags, in transparent screens on windshields of cars (to show the route, current speed), items of clothing, etc. Moreover, many familiar household appliances — for example, a calculator — can be almost completely printed out of plastic. Instead of the case, the buttons and the screen, different colors are simply applied to the corresponding areas of the transparent substrate. This will fundamentally change the design of many electronic gadgets.



Since the invention of plastic electronics in the late 1970s, many ways have been invented how to imprint the active material into the polymer surface. In this case, instead of silicon, different organic mixtures are used as quality, and chips can be printed at home on a printer of relatively small size.

')

Plastic electronics has not yet found widespread commercial use due to its very low operating speed (several hundred hertz) and high operating voltage (hundreds of volts). Scientists from Cambridge made a real breakthrough in this area: the device they created works relatively quickly and at low voltage. The secret is in the new organic material, which greatly simplifies the process. The fact is that for printing chips, you need two different active materials, and the new substance has ambipolar properties. Paint based on this material can be applied at a temperature slightly above room temperature. The speed of the organic chip is hundreds of kilohertz, and a 9-volt battery is enough to power it. The authors of scientific work are now working to further reduce the requirements for power supply - this is necessary for the mass use of organic circuits in everyday things.



The work of scientists from the University of Cambridge published in the March issue of the journal Advanced Materials (Vol. 24, No. 12, pp. 1558-1565).