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Newswise — Technologists have long dreamed that flexible displays would be sharp, bright, and vivid, and yet roll up like window shades when not in use. Radio frequency identification tags could follow the contours of products being identified. Light, portable, and powerful antennas would unfurl in space, on the battlefield, or at the beach. Similar lightweight sheets of sensors and circuits, large and pliable, could cover airplane fuselages or nuclear-reactor pipes--and someday, space-station or moon-base exteriors--continually monitoring their physical integrity and triggering an alarm the instant a tiny crack forms.
Indeed, lightweight flexible electronics, in the form of small display screens for wristwatches and the like, are at last taking their first tentative steps into a few niche markets. But as with many novel technologies, greater commercial success awaits cheaper manufacturing methods. And now, engineers are close to delivering one: by adapting the ubiquitous, low-cost technologies of inkjet printing, they have already managed to produce simple flexible circuits up to 50 square centimeters. In fact, the research division of Royal Philips Electronics NV is now working with Dimatix Inc., which makes inkjet printheads, to produce light-emitting-diode displays for cellphones using an inkjet process.
If this and similar work live up to their promise, it could herald a radical advance in the electronics industry: the cheap and fast creation of high-quality, even custom, plastic-based ICs with fabrication equipment not much bigger than a microwave oven.
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