Dr Rogers first fabricated a mesh containing a circuit of silicon electronics by thinning silicon until it becomes flexible.
Another such story, related to me by Steve Blank in a recent interview, recounts a desperate situation for another pioneering Silicon Valley electronics manufacturer: Its recipe for doping (preparing) silicon wafers had stopped working.
FORBES: Paying It Forward: Silicon Valley's Open Secret to Success
They can be made at room temperature, unlike a silicon chip, and paper is a lot less pricey than electronics-grade silicon.
Much of the technology has been developed jointly by the Volkswagen Group Electronics Research Lab in Silicon Valley and Stanford University.
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Spun out from Philips Electronics in 2007, Silicon Hive specializes in paralell processing designs that can be built into the system-on-chip products at the heart of multimedia-friendly consumer electronics devices.
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While that might not sound like the most exciting thing in the world, the company's CEO says that it could not only drastically reduce the electricity wasted by electronics that currently rely on silicon components, but significantly reduce the size of the components as well.
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It is also the birthplace of Silicon Valley--and thus of the electronics revolution.
Their working model is a shoebox-sized package of electronics and liquid-filled tubes, with a silicon chip at its core.
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At an International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) event, AMD demonstrated working silicon of its first true system on chip (SoC) APUs, codenamed "Temash" and "Kabini, " which will be the industry's first quad-core x86 SoCs.
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But these are no Silicon Valley techies in town for one of the city's massive electronics shows.
"I quickly grasped that the silicon chip would remain opaque in my imagination unless I first learned solid state electronics, " Gilder told me.
We are likely to see hybrid silicon-graphene transistors before we take the leap to all-graphene-based electronics.
Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneer in electronics manufacturing in the 1960s, is widely regarded as the first major Silicon Valley success story.
FORBES: Paying It Forward: Silicon Valley's Open Secret to Success
Light striking this detector liberates electrons from some of the silicon atoms, producing an electrical signal that is converted by the chip's electronics into a picture.
Blank got to Silicon Valley in 1978 via ESL, now a part of Northrop Grumman, which did defense electronics work.
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Plastic electronics technology has many economic, manufacturing, form factor and environmental benefits, assuring that it will replace silicon in a variety of devices in the future.
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