In 2012, we have reported the first microprocessors processed directly on plastic films with organic TFTs 10 and subsequently with hybrid organic-oxide technology on plastic-film compatible process temperatures 11. Flexible microprocessors were first produced by a poly-silicon thin-film transistor (TFT) transfer technology onto plastic film 7, 8, 9. Hence to accelerate Wight's Law evolution, industry needs a way to tie all these applications together to maximize the learning from cumulative production.īy its generic nature, a microprocessor offers the possibility to do just this. However the Internet of Things covers thousands of different device types. Moreover, as large-area printed electronics has limited scope for the transistor scaling, that drives Moore's Law, we can expect that Wright's Law will govern cost evolution in this field. Wright's Law has been found to be slightly more successful at predicting cost evolution than Moore's Law for a range of technologies 6.
THIN FILM TRANSISTOR HOW TO
In other words, the more of a product we have made, the more we know about how to make the product efficiently and hence cheaply. Arising from the aeronautical industry in the 1930s, Wright's Law 5 postulates that the cost of manufacturing a product falls at a rate that depends on cumulative production. However, Moore's Law isn't the only mathematical relationship for describing technology cost evolution. Hence, Moore's Law can also be formulated as “the cost of a unit of computing power falls exponentially over time.” Today, this famous prediction is usually stated as “the number of transistors on a single chip approximately doubles every two years.” Moore's original argument was economic rather than technological, based on the transistor density that enabled the minimum cost per transistor. In the traditional silicon-based semiconductor industry, technology cost evolution has been successfully described by Moore's Law 4 for over five decades. They need to be manufactured in high volumes to become affordably priced, but they need to be affordably priced to be sold in high volumes. However, large-area electronics and the Internet of Things devices are currently just emerging and are stuck in the classic ‘chicken-and-egg’ situation of new technologies. This reduces the cost and simplifies integration into everyday objects. Large-area printing techniques are an attractive option for manufacturing these electronics as they allow circuits to be produced in very high volumes on very thin, flexible plastic substrates. This vision involves embedding electronic intelligence into billions of every day objects. The Internet of Things 1, 2, 3 has the potential to transform our daily lives, reduce global energy consumption and cut waste.
THIN FILM TRANSISTOR CODE
An instruction set of 16 code lines, each line providing a 9 bit instruction, is defined by means of inkjet printing of conductive silver inks. It operates at 6.5 V and reaches clock frequencies up to 2.1 kHz. The processor combines organic p-type and soluble oxide n-type thin-film transistors in a new flavor of the familiar complementary transistor technology with the potential to be manufactured on a very thin polyimide film, enabling low-cost flexible electronics.
THIN FILM TRANSISTOR GENERATOR
We present an 8-bit thin-film microprocessor with a write-once, read-many (WORM) instruction generator that can be programmed after manufacture via inkjet printing. This implies that a generic electronic device that can be tailored for application-specific requirements during downstream integration would be a cornerstone in the development of the Internet of Things. We believe the future evolution of this technology will be governed by Wright's Law, which was first proposed in 1936 and states that the cost of a product decreases with cumulative production.
This requires seamless integration of relatively simple electronics, for example through ‘stick-on’ electronics labels. The Internet of Things is driving extensive efforts to develop intelligent everyday objects.