Printed plastic electronic devices

Semiconductor electronics are not typically made from plastics, but two forces are combining to make this happen. The rapidly growing flat panel display and TV industry needs transistors with modest performance that can be made inexpensively, and the electronic performance of semiconducting plastics has improved dramatically over the past decade or so. One key attraction of plastic electronics is that devices can be made by ink-jet printing in processes more like a printing press than a silicon foundry. The talk will describe the applications of plastic electronics, the key innovations that made these possible, and PARC’s technology for jet-printed plastic displays.

Presenter(s)

Bob Street received a BA and Ph.D. in physics from Cambridge University and then worked at Sheffield University and the Max Planck Institute in Stuttgart before coming to PARC in 1976. He is a Senior Research Fellow with research interests in large area electronics, including amorphous silicon, flat panel x-ray image sensors and more recently, printed organic semiconductors.