We may think of "plastic electronics" as any Chinese-made product that needs to be plugged into the wall, but in this definition, it means the circuitry itself that's plastic rather than silicon, and can be used to create things that require flexibility. Today, as we've seen firsthand with OLED production, plastic circuitry can be made using inkjet printing. Another technique is lithographic etching.

Self-assembly is more practical, but Philips' breakthrough needs to be worked on before it can be put to use in a factory. One researcher, Edsger Smits, told Technology Review that the goal "is to be able to throw molecules in a beaker and let them organize into desired structures." Yeah, great, but desired by whom, Edsger? [Technology Review]

To create the special silicon, Harvard physicist Eric Mazur shined a super powerful laser onto a silicon wafer. The laser's output briefly matches all the energy produced by the sun falling onto the Earth's entire surface at a given moment in time. To spice the experiment up, he also had researchers apply sulfur hexafluoride, which the semiconductor industry uses to make etchings in silicon for circuitry. Seriously, he did this just for kicks and to secure more funding for an old project.

“I got tired of metals and was worrying that my Army funding would dry up,” he said. “I wrote the new direction into a research proposal without thinking much about it — I just wrote it in; I don’t know why," he said.

The new experiment made the silicon black to the naked eye. Under an electron microscope, however, the dark sheen was revealed to be thousands, if not millions, of tiny spikes. As we said above, those spikes had an amazing effect on the light sensitivity of the wafer. Mazur said the material also absorbs about twice as much visible light as traditional silicon, and can detect infrared light that is invisible to today's silicon detectors.

And there's no change to the manufacturing process, Mazur said, so existing semiconductor facilities can create black silicon without much additional effort or, more importantly, money. [New York Times]

Silicon Valley historical tourists (they exist) used to find a sign with information detailing the site's history, which seems to have gotten chucked in the remodeling:

“I have no idea what happened to it,” said Pablo Martinez, the owner of Fiesta Super Market, talking about the Shockley sign.

And here is what the "three to five people" per month see when they visit the nearby home of Fairchild Semiconductor:Interesting to see how a tech culture so caught up in the future deals with its historical past. Much more good reading over at Bits. [Bits Blog]

Two engineering professors at Columbia University tested graphene's strength at an atomic level by indenting a perfect sample of the material with a sharp probe made of diamond. The results confirm what many had suspected all along—and that will go a long way to bolster the case that graphene would be able to handle the heat produced in future ultrafast processors. [Technology Review]

Rohm estimates that around 15 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, roughly the output capacity of two nuclear reactors, are consumed every year in Japan by devices on standby. In the U.S., vampire power is estimated to cost consumers $3 billion annually.

Experiments have already shown that an average game console could cut its power use by roughly 70% if it adopts circuits incorporating the new technology—exciting news for people like me, who tend to forget to power off their Wiis at night. Rohm says it'll start producing the circuits on a commercial basis within a year or so. [Japan Today]

Of course advances in semiconductor transistor fabrication will shrink the minimum size down from 32nm soon enough, but when 10nm is reached the cold, hard laws of physics will get in the way. And that's why the graphene transistor is important, since the research team at the University of Manchester says their transistor is already working at just 1nm.

It's made by taking a sheet of graphene, made using standard semiconductor fab techniques, and carving it with an electron beam. This creates a central quantum-dot with a voltage-sensitive conductivity, much as in conventional transistors. Amazing. The one flaw is that for now it's hard to produce graphene in large quantities: the biggest crystals made so far are less than 0.1mm across, and that's too small for mass production. The Manchester team thinks it won't be long until that problem is solved though. Will that mean graphene-chip supercomputer power in pocket sizes? We'll have to see. [Wired Science]

Graphene also has a resistivity (opposition to the flow of electric current) of 1.0 microOhm-cm—which is 35% less than copper. That figure would also make graphene the lowest resistivity material at room temperature. However, impurities in graphine make it less effective than copper at transferring electrons (at least for the moment). Still, with some refinement, the future looks promising for graphene as our next "miracle material." [University of Maryland via Slashdot]

We're guessing the technology for the smile shutter is what we have seen previously in some of the Cyber-shot range. All in all, it's great news for high end photography on your cellphone and as the advanced CMOS sensors will go into mass production in Q3/4 this year, we won't have to wait too long either. [Samsung]

Intel Chips from 1971 to 2007:

Intel's History of the Transistor:

[Intel]