While other electronics engineers were knocking themselves silly to make better silicon chips, Dago de Leeuw decided to work with a different material: plastic. Although people have known for years that some polymer plastics are good at conducting electricity, it took de Leeuw and his team at Philips Research Laboratories in the Netherlands to figure out how to transform them into integrated circuits.
De Leeuw says the basic motivating idea was: "Don't compete with silicon. We are not going to make plastic Pentiums." Instead, he and his colleagues planned to create low-end circuits for high-volume applications—in essence, disposable electronics.
These all-polymer circuits are made in a process similar to the way silicon chips are manufactured but under less stringent conditions, which greatly reduces cost. De Leeuw used stock fabrication techniques and easily created different layers of the integrated circuit. But working with the polymers introduced unfamiliar problems. His team experimented ...
