Plastic electronics and future trends in microelectronics

Abstract

The celebrated information technology (IT), has been a phenomenal success. But, it is a narrow one. It has marched along a one-dimensional path of information processing and transmission, but extended little to the left — acquiring information, or to the right — executing on information. It is in the tremendous space and potential to the left and right of the evolution path that plastic electronics is envisioned as an enabling technology. Complementing the ever more powerful microelectronics, it has the potential to be a disruptive technology to microelectronics. While this has always been a distant possibility in the past, the time for a major breakthrough is now within sight. This has much to do with the state of microelectronics and with the recent profound progress in developing organic electronic materials. Microelectronics, as the engine driving today’s IT advances, has come to a crossroads. On the road to nanoelectronics, one sees exponentially increasing cost and diminishing return with billion dollar IC fab cost doubling every generation. The high cost is, on the one hand, squeezing out all but the largest players and on the other, slowing down innovation from within. Troubles at the physical foundation of today’s microelectronics are of as much concern, if not more so. The wiring challenge and the power dissipation crisis are only going to get worse with each further step of miniaturization. These problems are deeply rooted in the much-hyped digitalization, i.e. the paradigm of binary and serial signal processing. In this state of microelectronics, the opportunities for alternative technologies are emerging, and will be best pursued if not by our own initiatives then maybe by the movement of investors’ dollars to areas of greater return. At the crossroads, microelectronics can go down to nanoelectronics. But, it can also move up to macroelectronics, and can extend to the left and to the right, where plastic electronics enters as an enabling base technology. In contrast to silicon microelectronics, plastic electronics can be large-area (macrosize IC, display, memory films), large critical feature size (macro linewidth), and compatible with a continuous rotary fabrication (printing) process rather than the batch (lithographic) fabrication. The performance of individual plastic electronic devices or ICs is unlikely to match the silicon counterparts — now or ever — one might say. But disruptive technologies do not have to satisfy the same performance criteria as existing ones because they address new products and new markets, as the Harvard Business School teaching goes.