Faster Plastic Circuits

摘要

A new way to create high-quality silicon components on plastic could make flexible computing practical.Electronic displays can now be made on flexible materials,and they're appearing in limited applications.But the highspeed processing power to run them still requires expensive - and rigid - silicon wafers.If all the components could be built onto the same flexible surface,though,it could save money,improve reliability,and perhaps allow for radical new designs.Researchers have built working circuits now on plastic that are fast enough to make this integration possible.At Sarnoff Corporation in Princeton,IMJ,and Columbia University,researchers have succeeded in operating circuits at 100 megahertz - as much as a hundred times faster than previous ones on plastic.