Thiophene Chips – the plastic chips!

Using a new plastic type based on material called thiophene allows building chips without silicium. This plastic conducts electricity 6 times better than established plastic materials.

Iain McCulloch, scientist at the chemical company Merck, Germany found this as published an article preview called “A strong regioregularity effect in self-organizing conjugated polymer films and high-efficiency polythiophene:fullerene solar cells”

These plastic chips are heavily researched in the field of Polymer Electronics for years already. Science news paper are constantly reporting about the plastic chips research progress.

There are already theophene semiconductor patents registered/pending by other companies like 3m so we’ll see various brands and producers fighting for their launch of production-ready plastic chips.

Plastic Chips

One other example of polymer electronics (plastic chips) are OLEDs – organic leds that are used in high resolution and vivid colorful display screens.

The radically different manufacturing process of OLEDs lends itself to many advantages over flat panel displays made with LCD technology. Since OLEDs can be printed onto any suitable substrate using inkjet printer technology they can theoretically have a significantly lower cost than LCDs or plasma displays.

IBM has a nice introduction to organic electronics

Are Silicium Chips dead?

Polymer Electronics can't challenge silicon in heavy-duty number-crunching jobs now, although that may be just a matter of time. Plastic transistors today are positively poky compared with silicon versions, concedes Alan J. Heeger, the University of California at Santa Barbara physicist who shared a Nobel prize in 2000 for helping to create the first conductive polymer in 1977. But the speed of poly transistors has been rising steadily. "Every improvement," says Heeger, "expands the potential market."

Quote from the BW online back in 2004:

Here is another research paper on polymer electronics “Conductive Thiophene Oligomers” can be found here.

More Theophene Resources

Expect more content soon...