Plastic makes chip printing possible

        This might sound a bit mad, but imagine if you could print out your own computer. With new developments in fabricating semiconductor chips from plastic instead of silicon, it might just happen.

          The conventional manufacturing process for silicon-based chips is expensive, slow and error-prone. A typical chip production plant costs upwards of $2 billion, and it takes two weeks of full-time manufacturing to make a single chip of Pentium-scale complexity.

          It's like that because each 12in silicon wafer, which can hold a few hundred identical chips, must be processed again and again by different machines, as the complex patterns are etched into the silicon. But now a completely different manufacturing technique is emerging, which promises to revolutionize the industry. Researchers are printing chips onto flexible plastic sheets, and they're doing it on the desktop.