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Transparent Transistors Are Coming

Posted by samzenpus on from the invisible-keyboard dept.

Roland Piquepaille writes "Transparent electronics is an emerging technology which aims to produce invisible electronic circuits. Now, researchers from Oregon report they made a major advance in transparent electronics. Their zinc-tin-oxide 'thin-film' materials are amorphous, physically robust, chemically stable and cheap to produce at just above room temperature. These new materials and transistors offer many new possibilities for consumer electronics, transportation, business and the military."

3 of 159 comments (clear)

  1. Roland Piquepaille and /.: Is there a connection? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    Roland Piquepaille and Slashdot: Is there a connection?

    I think most of you are aware of the controversy surrounding regular Slashdot article submitter Roland Piquepaille. For those of you who don't know, please allow me to bring forth all the facts. Roland Piquepaille has an online journal (I refuse to use the word "blog") located at www.primidi.com . It is titled "Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends". It consists almost entirely of content, both text and pictures, taken from reputable news websites and online technical journals. He does give credit to the other websites, but it wasn't always so. Only after many complaints were raised by the Slashdot readership did he start giving credit where credit was due. However, this is not what the controversy is about.

    Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends serves online advertisements through a service called Blogads, located at www.blogads.com. Blogads is not your traditional online advertiser; rather than base payments on click-throughs, Blogads pays a flat fee based on the level of traffic your online journal generates. This way Blogads can guarantee that an advertisement on a particular online journal will reach a particular number of users. So advertisements on high traffic online journals are appropriately more expensive to buy, but the advertisement is guaranteed to be seen by a large amount of people. This, in turn, encourages people like Roland Piquepaille to try their best to increase traffic to their journals in order to increase the going rates for advertisements on their web pages. But advertisers do have some flexibility. Blogads serves two classes of advertisements. The premium ad space that is seen at the top of the web page by all viewers is reserved for "Special Advertisers"; it holds only one advertisement. The secondary ad space is located near the bottom half of the page, so that the user must scroll down the window to see it. This space can contain up to four advertisements and is reserved for regular advertisers, or just "Advertisers". Visit Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends (www.primidi.com) to see it for yourself.

    Before we talk about money, let's talk about the service that Roland Piquepaille provides in his journal. He goes out and looks for interesting articles about new and emerging technologies. He provides a very brief overview of the articles, then copies a few choice paragraphs and the occasional picture from each article and puts them up on his web page. Finally, he adds a minimal amount of original content between the copied-and-pasted text in an effort to make the journal entry coherent and appear to add value to the original articles. Nothing more, nothing less.

    Now let's talk about money.

    Visit http://www.blogads.com/order_html?adstrip_category =tech&politics= to check the following facts for yourself. As of today, December XX 2004, the going rate for the premium advertisement space on Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends is $375 for one month. One of the four standard advertisements costs $150 for one month. So, the maximum advertising space brings in $375 x 1 + $150 x 4 = $975 for one month. Obviously not all $975 will go directly to Roland Piquepaille, as Blogads gets a portion of that as a service fee, but he will receive the majority of it. According to the FAQ, Blogads takes 20%. So Roland Piquepaille gets 80% of $975, a maximum of $780 each month. www.primidi.com is hosted by clara.net (look it up at http://www.networksolutions.com/en_US/whois/index) . Browsing clara.net's hosting solutions, the most expensive hosting service is their Clarahost Advanced (

  2. Sounds like just another ITO by gaber1187 · · Score: 5, Informative
    Sounds alot like the Nature Nov 25th issue which mentions another advance in indium gallium zinc oxide by a japanese group. They did theirs on a plastic substrate with an amorphous oxide.

    Zinc Tin Oxide sounds alot like indium tin oxide (ITO) which is pretty commonly used, but has commonly known downsides. I don't think this is all that impressive.

    1. Re:Sounds like just another ITO by gaber1187 · · Score: 4, Informative
      After looking up the paper in applied physics letters, they mentioned more properties about the material and that it is in the class of amorphous oxide conductors (which is where you dope a heavy metal oxide with something like Tin to make it conductive). In fact, this material could be used quite easily just like ITO, but it actually has a lower conductivity than ITO. What these guys did is use the ITO as a semiconductor channel not just as a conductor. The ON voltage is 5V (due to the large 3.35 eV bandgap), compared to about less than 0.5 volts for most modern VLSI devices.

      The reason I mention the Japanese work is that they use multiple components molecules which apparently helps maintain the amorphous qualities of the film. In other words, I think this work is not as good as the Japanese work.