Printable Chips Make Their Debut

By Ed Sperling -- Electronic News, 6/26/2006

Several new companies are working with a technology for printing circuits on plastic or thin film using commercial inkjet printers. If they’re successful, these companies could radically alter the economics of producing chips and the time it takes to create them.

Nanoident, based in Linz, Austria, has set its sights initially on photodetectors that can be printed on glass, plastic, or even paper. Unlike current x-rays, which can be used to scan a portion of the human body, for example, Nanoident’s technology can be used to scan the entire body at once.

“We can do infinite lengths,” said Klaus Schroeter, CEO of the startup that he founded in late 2004. “We can create completely new applications for this. With biometric sensors, we can produce fingerprint detectors for the entire world in a matter of a few hours.”

And that’s only the beginning. Schroeter said the company in the near future will be able to print entire processors on either organic or inorganic materials, adding one layer over another of circuitry using inkjet technology on a gross scale, or nano imprints as small as 15 nanometers.

“As soon as the organic semiconductor layer dries, it behaves like silicon,” he said. “Depositing one layer is not complicated, but it gets more and more complex with additional layers because the chemistry of the upper layers must not destroy the layers below. We can do it today for five layers.”

He said the production process is highly scalable and can be done in an office environment. “It’s wrong to think this will replace silicon,” he noted. “Switching speeds are higher on silicon because switching speeds are dependent on electron mobility. But there are other printable inorganic materials that are up to 300 times faster than silicon.”

Similar technology is being applied in the solar realm by privately held Miasole and Nanosolar, which recently received $100 million in series C funding as interest in scalable solar manufacturing heats up with rising gasoline costs. Both companies are printing photovoltaic cells on flexible materials such as foil and plastic.