On the way to plastic computation

The development of post silicon technologies based on organic materials consolidates the possibility to realize new devices and applications with unusual properties: flexibility, lightweight, disposability. Both materials and processes play a fundamental role in this new electronic framework and have been improved continuously in the last decades. In this contribution, a new perspective will be drawn by considering a complete technology platform that lead printed organic electronics technology from the basic device and materials to a manufacturing process flow, design tools and market applications development. The final goal of the proposed approach is the manufacturing of organic circuits with sub-micron feature size at low fabrication costs with high flexibility and application versatility by using additive manufacturing processes. The identification of suitable material features and process steps and the implementation of dedicated CAD tools in a complete workflow are here reported. Moreover, the feasibility of the adopted technology is demonstrated by the design of both digital and analog circuits. Multilayered structure devices, like Organic Thin Film Transistor (OTFT), are used to design complex architectures like arithmetic logic units and nonlinear oscillators. © 2006 IEEE.