Can Plastic Replace Silicon?

Can plastic materials morph into computers? A research breakthrough recently published brings such a possibility closer to reality.

Researchers are looking at the possibility of making low-power, flexible and inexpensive computers out of plastic materials. Plastic is not normally a good conductive material. However, researchers said this week that they have solved a problem related to reading data.

The research, which involved converting electricity from magnetic film to optics so data could be read through plastic material, was conducted by researchers at the University of Iowa and New York University. A paper on the research was published in this week’s Nature Communications journal.

More research is needed before plastic computers become practical, acknowledged Michael Flatte, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Iowa. Problems related to writing and processing data need to be solved before plastic computers can be commercially viable.

Plastic computers, however, could conceivably be used in smartphones, sensors, wearable products, small electronics or solar cells, Flatte said.

The computers would have basic processing, data gathering and transmission capabilities but won’t replace silicon used in the fastest computers today. However, the plastic material could be cheaper to produce as it wouldn’t require silicon fab plants, and possibly could supplement faster silicon components in mobile devices or sensors.

“The initial types of inexpensive computers envisioned are things like RFID, but with much more computing power and information storage, or distributed sensors,” Flatte said. One such implementation might be a large agricultural field with independent temperature sensors made from these devices, distributed at hundreds of places around the field, he said.

The research breakthrough this week is an important step in giving plastic computers the sensor-like ability to store data, locally process the information and report data back to a central computer.

Mobile phones, which demand more computing power than sensors, will require more advances because communication requires microwave emissions usually produced by higher-speed transistors than have been made with plastic.

It’s difficult for plastic to compete in the electronics area because silicon is such an effective technology, Flatte acknowledged. But there are applications where the flexibility of plastic could be advantageous, he said, raising the possibility of plastic computers being information processors in refrigerators or other common home electronics.

“This won’t be faster or smaller, but it will be cheaper and lower power, we hope,” Flatte said.

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Stanford Develops Carbon Nanotubes

Researchers at Stanford University have demonstrated the first functional computer constructed using only carbon nanotube transistors.

Scientists have been experimenting with transistors based on carbon nanotubes, or CNTs, as substitutes for silicon transistors, which may soon hit their physical limits.

The rudimentary CNT computer is said to run a simple operating system capable of multitasking, according to a synopsis of an article published in the journal Nature.

Made of 178 transistors, each containing between 10 and 200 carbon nanotubes, the computer can do four tasks summarized as instruction fetch, data fetch, arithmetic operation and write-back, and run two different programs concurrently.

The research team was led by Stanford professors Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong.

“People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon,” Mitra said in a statement. “But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using [the] technology. Here is the proof.”

IBM last October said its scientists had placed more than 10,000 transistors made of nano-size tubes of carbon on a single chip. Previous efforts had yielded chips with just a few hundred carbon nanotubes.

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