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To: Boplicity who wrote (705)	10/28/1999 4:17:00 PM
From: T L Comiskey	Respond to of 1884

Greg...OT....Deja vu.....Thursday October 28 3:59 PM ET IBM Makes Flexible, Chemical Transistor By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Researchers at International Business Machines Corp (NYSE:IBM - news). said Thursday they had created a thin, flexible kind of transistor that could one day be used to make, for instance, a computer screen that could be rolled up. Their invention is cheap and can be sprayed onto plastic, making it useful in a variety of areas, they said. ``We are really talking about a new class of materials for transistors,' Cherie Kagan, a materials scientists at IBM in Yorktown Heights, New York, who led the study, said in a telephone interview. The transistors are made out of very thin layers of materials that can be laid down onto plastic. ``You might be able to build devices on something that is flexible,' Kagan said. Transistors currently are made out of materials that must be processed at very high temperatures. That means they have to go onto hard, unmeltable surfaces. ``The display on your laptop is silicon and requires much higher temperatures,' Kagan said. ``Plastic couldn't stand up to those temperatures. You would just obliterate the thing.' Writing in the journal Science, Kagan and her colleagues describe their technique, which uses layers of both organic and inorganic chemicals. ``In this material, you get the benefits of both worlds,' Kagan said. ``You get the benefit of an inorganic semiconductor that (conducts electricity) and an organic material that helps modulate the structure, and the combination makes them easy to handle out of solution,' she added. ``It means that we can take these materials, put them in solution and spin-coat them. The idea is that it is low-cost and makes it possible to do it at room temperature.' Kagan's team used a compound called phenethylammonium tin iodide. It combines the organic compound phenethylammonium with the inorganic tin iodide, each in its own layer, in a coating thinner than a human hair. Kagan said IBM is looking to see if other metals and organic compounds will also work. She said the transistor is comparable to amorphous silicon -- the glasslike version of silicon that is used in computer displays and elsewhere. It will not replace silicon chips. ``This approach is a pretty radical idea for the industry, but it makes perfect sense to a chemist,' she added in a statement. ``We let nature do a lot of the work for us, using self-assembly to produce materials with the best characteristics of both worlds, organic and inorganic.' A team at Lucent Technologies Inc (NYSE:LU - news).'s Bell Labs has been working to make a plastic transistor in a similar process to IBM's -- by spraying liquids onto a plastic surface. Other scientists are working on materials that could replace the lighted part of the display. Earlier this month, Lucent and E Ink Corp., which makes 'electronic ink' used in billboards and large signs, said they had teamed up to develop a low-cost ``electronic paper'. They hope to produce a flexible plastic sheet that would electronically display text and images -- a possible replacement for liquid crystal displays, the silver-toned screens used in digital watches, calculators and cellphones. Electronic paper uses small beads enmeshed in a flexible binder sheet. They rotate to present one side to the viewer when a pattern of electrical voltage is applied.