Promising research efforts are under way to combine silicon and plastic, using organic polymers as material for the production of microelectronics, including transistors and displays.
Organic polymers are molecules that contain a long string of carbon atoms and make versatile plastics.

The research team headed by Bertram Batlogg of the Swiss Federal Institute for Technology from the ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, was recently honored with one of the most notable awards in the scientific world of Europe, the German Braunschweig Prize, for work on leading plastics.

Batlogg’s work has proven that organic materials like plastic could be used for the manufacturing of semiconductors, lasers and even superconductors. This may lead to flat screens consumers can fold, intelligent labels, cheap solar cells, and even quantum computing devices.