Silicon chips are a long way from perfect. Manufacture involves hefty expense, high temperatures and some nasty chemicals. The alternative promises to be cheaper and much less finicky. Plastic Logic will be using polyethylene, one of the world’s most widely used polymers, to make tiny electronic circuits. The significance of Plastic Logic’s factory is that this is the first time anybody’s tried to mass-produce plastic circuits. Soon, the plastic chip may be available at one tenth the price of its silicon equivalent. That would open up a host of new smart digital purposes and change the nature of our household gadgetry. Forget today’s fragile computer screens. A lightweight plastic screen would survive the roughest toddler or the most careless adult.
First possible victim of the plastic revolution: the book. So far, the clunky e-book has failed to wow the reading public, but Hauser talks of creating the “iPod of text”–a convenient way of carrying around a vast supply of reading material. Within a year or two, the new plant in Dresden should be turning out millions of flexible semiconductor sheets for use as display screens no thicker than the standard credit card. (Most likely, Plastic Logic will supply the raw circuitry, leaving applications to others.) Even the most traditionally minded bibliophile might like the chance to browse 100 novels from a single slip of plastic. Within a decade, the arrival of the throwaway plastic chip might make fact out of some of the more common science fictions. How about a speaking microchip in a can’s wrapper that gives recipe suggestions? Or toys with an embedded chip to tell children how they’re operated? Or a chip in your hat that calls you on your cell phone when you leave it behind? Skeptics may scoff, but the industry is taking no chances. Intel, the world’s largest silicon chipmaker, is also an investor.
