European Commission, under its 6th Research,Technological development, and Demonstration Framework Program, has launched a new, four-year research project called PolyApply. The PolyApply consortium comprises 20 partners, including leading European industrial enterprises as well as renowned academic and research institutes. Its goal is to lay the foundations for a scalable and ubiquitously applicable communication technology that will make ambient intelligence commercially viable through the use of low-cost, polymer-based circuits. Ambient intelligence means integrating a variety of electronic functions, such as sensing, computing, and communications, into everyday products, all of which will be able to interact via a low-cost, RF-communications technology. Today, although most electronic functions are implemented by means of silicon chips and each new generation of silicon process technology reduces the cost of implementing a given function, many potential applications of ambient intelligence require costs far lower than can be achieved with traditional silicon-based ICs.

While the new technology will preserve existing system- and circuit-design expertise, it will exploit new materials and devices that can be manufactured at substantially lower cost. Polymer-based electronics promises to allow these sensing, computing, and communications functions, as well as additional capabilities that will result in new products with added value, to be implemented on a wide range of substrates. These substrates include flexible or paper materials.

Within the PolyApply project, STMicroelectronics has been chosen to coordinate all of the activities and will also lead the team working on the development of new materials, devices, and circuits. Gianguido Rizzotto, group vice president and general manager of ST's Soft-computing, Silicon optics and post-silicon Technologies (SST) group, will act as overall coordinator of the PolyApply project.

"Although silicon technology has underpinned most advances in electronic devices and applications for many decades and will continue to have this fundamental role for at least the next ten years, there are many exciting potential applications that can only be enabled by the development of new technologies, such as polymer electronics, that are inherently much less expensive than silicon," said Rizzotto.

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