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To: Tim Luke who wrote (9567)	10/29/1999 10:26:00 AM
From: SIer formerly known as Joe B.	Respond to of 32873

IBM Team Makes Flexible Transistor Friday October 29 1:27 AM ET dailynews.yahoo.com 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. Their new transistors are made out of very thin layers of materials that can be laid down onto plastic. ''You might be able to basically build devices on something that is flexible,'' Kagan said. Transistors currently are made out of materials that have to be processed at very high temperatures. That means that 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. It is a pretty cheap process. The idea is that it is low-cost and makes it possible to do it at room temperature.'' For their report, 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 can basically replace amorphous silicon -- the glasslike version of silicon that is used in computer displays and elsewhere. It will not replace silicon chips. ''It has device characteristics that are comparable to amorphous silicon, which is the benchmark,'' she said. Other scientists are working on materials that could replace the lighted part of the display.