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CIRCUITS ON CELLULOSE
PaPer electronics could Pave the way to a
new generation of cheaP, flexible gadgets
By An drew J. Stec kl
You wake up with a heavy head. Was it the half dozen glasses of champagne last
night or are you getting sick? In your bathroom is a little strip of paper that can tell
you for sure. You place it on your tongue and after a few seconds, you pull it back to
see the bad news: There’s a small green dot next to the word “u.” When you sh your
doctor’s business card out of your wallet, you notice it looks dierent from the last
time you looked at it. The phone number for his oce was originally black. Now it’s
displayed in blinking red letters, a sign that the number was changed recently.
The electronics in this scenario are not far o; in fact the basic technological break-
throughs needed to make them work have all been achieved in the past few years. At
the moment the costs are still too high for them to be used in things like business cards
or package labels, but remarkable advances in materials science and simpler fabrica-
tion methods are setting the stage for a whole new breed of cheap, bendable, dispos-
able, and perhaps even recyclable electronics. And some of the most exciting work in
this eld is happening with paper.
At rst glance, paper might seem like an unlikely front-runner in the exible electronics
race. Straight o the shelf, the material isn’t nearly as rugged as plastic or as smooth
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