As researchers work towards the creation of plastic-based alternatives in order to to make technology more pervasive, silicon wafers might soon be biting the dust.
No one would need to interact with computers any more as technology would be ingrained into everyday objects like shirts, 'driverless' cars or therapeutic dolls", predicted Nicholas Negroponte, cofounder and director of MIT Media Laboratory in 1998. In his columns in the Wired magazine, (the further claimed that not only was the Digital Age upon us, but that we were already in the final stages of the digital revolution.
A big step in this/all-pervasive computing' direction is plastic re-engineering. Research in this field aims to create chips made of plastic wafers instead of silicon. Not only will such chips enable the products Negroponte talked about, it will also allow a hobbyist or a power-user to print his own PC!
