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Comment by apienx | Hacker News Reader

The 2000 Nobel prize in chemistry was awarded for the discovery of organic/polymer semiconductors. The field's come a long way and there has been lots of innovation happening since. Prototypes of polymer-based ICs is nothing new (I've seen plenty of them over the last decade). Metal is still preferred for interconnects, but that's pretty cheap to process in roll-to-roll. I can vouch for this being legit. That said, polymers (soft matter) doesn't do well in heat (or light), so applications are (and will forever be) restricted to low-cost throw-away devices IMO.

Shameful plug: I'm first author of this paper reporting a world record for transistor transconductance (all technologies combined). https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/advs.2015003...

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The technology used by PragmatIC is not based on organic semiconductors though. The only organic material is the substrate (Kapton, I assume).

The transistors are based on IGZO (Indium Gallium Zink Oxide), which is a relatively new material and is an amorphous high-channel mobility wide band gap material. The transistors are not as fast as LTPS, but have much lower leakage. Since the material does not have to by crystallized, it can be deposited at fairly low temperatures on plastic subtrate.

You may very well regard IGZO as the plastic electronics killer, because it does everything that PTTT/Pentacene etc. was supposed to do. Noble prize? Let's see.

Sadly, IGZO is not a rival to silicon when it comes to power efficiency, speed, and cost per gate. So these MCUs are nice demonstrators, but the use case is doubtful.

IGZO is great for display, large area sensing and possibly memory.

p.s.: Congrats on the research, very interesting paper! I am long out of the field, but still amazed about the progree being made. I wonder, what does the high ionic conductivity mean to device stability, especially if used with a field effect device?

My mind immediately went to Bell Labs Jan Schön superconducting plastics almost landing him a Nobel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nfDoml-Db64 (spoiler alert - it was all a scam)

> That said, polymers (soft matter) doesn't do well in heat (or light), so applications are (and will forever be) restricted to low-cost throw-away devices IMO.

I can think of plenty of sterile single-use 'use cases' in Medical Devices where a throw away polymer processor would be useful but an existing semi-conductor processor would not make financial sense to use.

> I can think of plenty of sterile single-use 'use cases' in Medical Devices where a throw away polymer processor would be useful but an existing semi-conductor processor would not make financial sense to use.

Could you provide some examples?

>That said, polymers (soft matter) doesn't do well in heat (or light), so applications are (and will forever be) restricted to low-cost throw-away devices IMO.

since I have no knowledge in this area I will ask a question that probably doesn't make sense - would these be useful in objects that were very sturdy and shielded from variations in heat and light - or will shielding cause other problem? I'm pretty much considering high cost outdoors equipment. Or given that it's probably high cost the cost of actually using metal ones would be negligible so it wouldn't make sense to skimp?

Don't be ashamed. Transconductance is cool as fuck.

any sight of 3d-printable semiconductors I can use to make 3d bulk circuits with?

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