INDUSTRY

IBM researchers report a scientific breakthrough that could help produce low-cost sheets of circuitry. In a paper being published in the journal Nature, researchers at IBM's T.J. Watson Research Center reported they have found a technique that brings a tenfold improvement to the mobility of electrical charges through a semiconductor film. Ordinarily, semiconductors are fabricated on rigid disks of silicon and costly tools and chemical processes are used to pack as many transistors as possible on each chip. But, the Wall Street Journal said, David Mitzi, who led the IBM research team, says the group found a new way to dissolve semiconductor materials in a liquid to create a film with high electrical mobility. IBM and others had been racing to perfect new manufacturing techniques that can lay down thin films of simpler semiconductors over much larger surfaces. This would include flexible plastics that could be coated with circuitry and churned out in rolls, like newsprint.