Word: siliconing
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...could be built: hospital bracelets synched to update when info is added to a medical file, musical scores that refresh so you'd never need to turn a page and a series of portable text displays. That, says Jones, is what happens when you can make circuits not from silicon but from plastic...
...Ever since conductive polymers were developed in the 1970s, researchers and entrepreneurs have wondered whether they could make commercially viable plastic electronics. Unlike microchips made of amorphous silicon and glass, polymer chips are light, hard to break and - perhaps best of all - as cheap as plastic. Although plastic transistors don't perform well enough to make the polymer PC a realistic goal for many years, they are quickly becoming suitable for applications where fragile silicon chips are impractical. Imagine electronics so cheap you could put them in disposable packaging, for example, or so light and flexible you could put them...
...whole library on a sheet of plastic. That makes it the first plant proposed anywhere that would produce plastic transistors on a commercial scale. Plastic Logic's plant attracted $100 million from such backers as Oak Investment Partners, Intel, Bank of America and BASF. "We believe there is nothing silicon transistors can do that polymer transistors won't be able to do eventually," says Hermann Hauser, a former physicist and now a partner at Plastic Logic financier Amadeus Capital Partners...
Saraf's own standards are astronautical. He spends his days designing satellite controls for space missions at Lockheed Martin. Evenings, he runs Naatak, a theater company he co-founded in 1995 to produce plays and movies, some of which he writes and acts in, for Silicon Valley's large South Asian population. A first novel published in India sank like a samosa, but The Peacock Throne is on several hot-new-books lists in the U.K. A French edition will appear next year, and a U.S. sale is imminent. "I'm now working on a fictionalized biography of my great...
Apollo and its competitors are close to perfecting the manufacturing process, but it's unlikely that man-made diamond will replace silicon entirely. Diamond manufacturing remains expensive, even after several spikes in silicon-wafer prices over the past year. But semiconductor researchers remain optimistic about diamond's future role; at the very least, a combination of silicon and diamond could produce more powerful devices that run at cooler temperatures. Says Mike Mayberry, director of components research at Intel: "We're still interested enough to keep...