A Closer Look At The Plastic Wireless Power Transmission Sheet

I am quite fascinated by the recent blog posts on a multi-layer wireless power transmission sheet developed by researchers at the University of Tokyo. By now, several blogs have reported on this story. It seems that the original story was posted on Apr 29, 2007 by Tom Geller on the Nature Newsblog (See Plastic sheet delivers wireless power); however in my research, I came across another post from December 2006 in MIT’s Technology Review (See Plastic Sheet of Power). So it appears that this has been going on for sometime. I also liked Roland Piquepaille’ post on his Technology Trends blog (See A wireless power transmission plastic sheet), mainly because it was complete and provided several key references to the works of these researchers.

I liked the pictures of the prototype device, especially the one powering an LED in water with the goldfish. Just for the sake of making my post “memorable”, I want to include it here with full credit to the University of Tokyo researchers (Takao Someya and co-workers) via Nature Material.

Naturally, I am quite interested in learning more about the structure of this 4-layer plastic film device and the technologies used to create the various components in each layer. Over the next few weeks, I plan to conduct more research to develop a better appreciation of this technology. In particular, I am interested in the following areas:

1. Thin film FET design and setup
2. Dielectric layer materials
3. Organic Semi-conductor layer
4. Printed circuits on plastic films
5. MEMS on thin film
6. Device integration

Apart from the opportunity to learn something “cool”, the main reason for my curiosity is the target manufacturing cost of US $100 per square meter. I think that this target cost must come down before this technology can become mainstream so that it can deliver on its promise.

I hope to keep you, the reader, engaged in this journey over the next few weeks. I appreciate your comments along the way. If you like what I write, and would like to offer suggestions on where I should focus more, please feel free to post a comment.