Plastic goes PC

Doch mit ein paar Tricks fällt dieses vermeintliche Naturgesetz und interessante neue Anwendungen eröffnen sich.
The supermarket checkout has no conveyor belt to put the shopping on. In its place, there is a gate alongside the checkout, which the shopping trolleys pass through. Once past the gate, the customer is presented with the bill without having unloaded the shopping. This is because, instead of a barcode, the product packagings bear a small memory chip containing product information that is read by a computer remotely via the gate. Why is this not a reality? Is it technically too difficult?
No. Telephone cards and bankcards incorporate memory chips which could, in principle, be read remotely. The technology for doing so is available. The restriction is entirely one of price. Even in mass production, the production price of a transponder -- a chip with all the requisites to be read remotely, including an antenna -- can easily cost as much as 45 Euro cents This price is of course too high to provide packaging material with memory chips.
Philips is working on the answer to the question that follows: can it be done more cheaply? Conventional microelectronics do not offer a solution, as the production process of a silicon chip is too complicated and therefore too costly. The solution is a completely new type of chip that can be made for just a few cents. The basic material of this new type of microelectronics is not an obvious one: the chips are made entirely of plastic.
Although plastics can exist in an almost infinite number of varieties, everyone intuitively knows one quality that plastics have in common: they are insulators, substances that do not conduct electric current. Copper electricity wires are encased in plastic for this very reason. There is, however, one category of plastics that is conductive. Conductive plastics already have a number of diverse applications, but not yet in microelectronics. Even so, conductive plastics are the first step on the way to the plastic chip and to numerous other applications, such as plastic solar cells. Conductive plastics have great potential. One of the advantages of plastic electronics is that there is virtually no restriction on size. Conventional semiconductor components have become smaller and smaller over the course of time. Silicon is the base material of all microelectronics and is eminently suited for this purpose. The making of larger components is however difficult and therefore costly. The silicon in semiconductor components has to be monocrystalline: it has to have a very pure crystal form without defects in the crystal structure. This is achieved by allowing melted silicon to crystallize under precisely controlled conditions. The larger the crystal, the more problematic this process is. Plastic does not, however, have any of these problems, so that semiconducting plastics are paving the way for larger semiconductor components. Studies by Philips Research in Eindhoven currently focus on two types of plastic electronics. The first is the aforementioned plastic memory chip. Philips is also working on the PolyLED, a plastic LED.
PolyLEDs
PolyLEDs offer substantial advantages over the existing solutions. Used as a display, they can, for example, be made much thinner than an LCD screen with backlight. For some applications this is necessary. PolyLEDs work on battery voltages, compatible with the current trend in the IC industry. To drive the PolyLEDs, direct use can therefore be made of the existing process technology in the IC industry.
PolyLEDs are very efficient in the generation of light. The luminous intensity is 4 to 5 lumens per watt (lm/W), while that of a picture tube is 1 lm/W and that of an LCD screen 1.5 lm/W. The screen of a laptop requires the most power. If you replace the screen with a comparable screen of PolyLEDs, a laptop will therefore run for three times as long on the same battery.
The most important benefit of the PolyLED is however the high contrast and the high brightness. This makes them suitable for making a high-quality display. They can be read easily in both bright and dark environments.
Plastic chips
Conducting and semiconducting plastics are paving the way for all-polymer electronics: microelectronics and chips based entirely on polymers (plastics). The electronic properties of the conducting polymers do not however match those of the extremely pure and monocrystalline silicon, which forms the basis of practically all today's microelectronics. But they do not need to. The plastic chip is not competing with the conventional silicon chip. Properties such as switching speed and durability of the silicon chip are superior to those of the plastic chip, but the latter has the edge on one important point: the price. The intention is therefore that the plastic chip should tap a new market, involving applications that demand little from the performance of the chips, but do require that they can be produced in large quantities at a low price. These are the main advantages of plastic electronics, plus the fact that the plastic chips can practically be folded double without breaking. A plastic chip is slightly more complex than a PolyLED because it contains more patterns and cross connections. The polymer chips inherit the benefits of their base material: they are flexible, cheap and easy to produce. There are therefore sufficient applications. The most important is without doubt the 'electronic barcode'. This is a small component that is incorporated into packaging material. Part of this is a plastic memory chip that contains product information and can be read remotely by electronic means. The same type of plastic memory chip is of course eminently suitable for bankcards and telephone cards. These cards currently still contain silicon memory chips. The plastic chip will ensure that the whole card can be made of plastic.
Philips Dossier/engine 01/03

aforementioned - zuvorgenannt
bear, to - tragen
benefit - Vorteil
checkout - Kasse
compete, to - wetteifern
conveyor belt - Förderband
costly - kostspielig
current - aktuell
durability - Haltbarkeit
eminently - überaus
encase, to - einschließen, ummanteln
in common - gemein(sam)
incorporate, to - beinhalten
inexpensive - günstig
insulator - Isolator
luminous intensity - Lichtstärke
melt, to - schmelzen
obvious - offensichtlich
pattern - Muster
pave the way, - to den Weg ebnen
remotely - fern-, entfernt
restriction - Einschränkung
semiconductor - Halbleiter
tap, to - anzapfen, erschließen
the latter - der Letztere
trolley - Einkaufswagen

Links: http://www.engine-magazin.de