Date: 25/08/2013

Walls and concrete structures can be embedded with electronics

Princeton University researchers have tried to integrate electronic circuit inside walls and such structures. The researchers have embedded very thin radios on plastic sheets, which can be applied to walls. The transistors for the electronic circuit is built using a kind of similar to printing technology and plastic electronics and they are built at low temperature of 300°C.

"These transistors do not perform nearly as well as the ones that Intel would make on one of its chips," Sturm said. "In fact, if you tried to make the radio with a circuit that Intel would use, but with our transistors on plastic, it simply would not work."

The research students Naveen Verma, Liechao Huang, Warren Rieutort-Louis, Yingzhe Hu and Josue Sanz Robinson have used a super-regenerative circuit to manage with the poor performance of the amorphous silicon transistors made by them.

"Essentially, you take the electrons and you slosh them back and forth between the inductor and capacitor, and the rate of this sloshing does not depend on getting electrons through the transistor — that means we can operate at frequencies that in some way are not limited by the transistors," Verma said. "But the key is to not lose very many electrons during this sloshing, because every electron you lose needs to be compensated through those transistors. So you need very high-quality capacitors and inductors."

To know more read the story at:
http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S37/69/38I40/index.xml?section=topstories
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N