Posted on Sunday, February 27 2011 @ 15:00 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Engadget
reports IMEC researchers have created bendable microprocessors that could potentially be created for just 1/10th the cost of silicon chips. These chips are not very powerful, but they may open a whole new world of computing:
Organic semiconductors have been teasing us with the possibility of computationally-inclined clothing for years, but until now we could only dream about our pants being the computer. That dream is closer to reality than ever, as researchers from IMEC have created a cheap (potentially 1/10th the cost of silicon chips), bendable microprocessor by layering a plastic substrate, gold circuits, organic dielectric, and a pentacene organic semiconductor to create an 8-bit logic circuit with 4000 transistors. Executing 6 instructions per second, these things won't be challenging Watson any time soon, but the chips should prove useful in creating cheaper flexible displays and sensors to tell us whether that week-old chicken in the fridge has gone bad.
