New tech developed in Sask. could make electronics cheaper

Your next iPhone could be a little cheaper thanks to a new technology being developed in Saskatchewan.

Researchers from the University of Ottawa are working in collaboration with the Canadian Light Source in Saskatoon to help develop a cheaper way of manufacturing electronics. The new technology, called organic electronics, works by engineering electronics that use carbon-based semiconductors rather than the standard silicon semiconductors that are used in many of the electronics we see today.

The switch to carbon would make electronics more flexible, bendable and biodegradable.

Research lead Benoit Lessard, who serves as Canada research chair in advanced polymer materials and organic electronics, recently joined the Evan Bray Show to share more about the new technology and its benefits.

“What organic electronics are is electronic devices where they are carbon-based instead of typical electronic devices, which are silicon-based, and what that means is they can be made, for example, out of plastic, so you can have conductive plastic, and so plastics can be flexible, lightweight, and inexpensive,” said Lessard.

“The display, the picture on the cell phone is what we call OLED so it’s organic light-emitting diode and so what you have there is some carbon-based molecules. You pass a current through them, they get excited and then they shine different lights and that’s how we make a cell phone display,” explained Lessard.

“The OLED can actually be made a lot thinner than your typical LCD display, which is why companies have gravitated towards them, because there’s more space for your battery and thinner phones – the things that people want. They’re still expensive, and so there’s a lot of research being done on trying to manufacture these materials at lower costs or just to bring down the production and manufacturing costs so that these kinds of displays can be more easily found.”

Lessard explained that the Saskatoon facility helps his researchers see how the technology works up close.

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“The Canadian Light Sources is a very unique facility in Canada,” Lessard said.

“It’s the only one in Canada actually where we can get so much energy that we can actually get a really good picture of what’s going on at those really small scales, and so I’ve sent my team from Ottawa all the way to Saskatchewan several times, at least a couple times a year, to really characterize what we were building and so that we can understand the manufacturing process and how that leads to better devices.”

Lessard said his research group has also been working on point-of-source sensors that could affect the future of agriculture, manufacturing, and medicine.

When it comes to agriculture, he said the new sensors would be able to tell producers when the optimal time is to harvest a crop. When it comes to medicine, he said the sensors could be used to assist emergency workers and paramedics in diagnosing and identifying what narcotics could be affecting an individual.

–Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to correct an error. A previous version said the researchers were at McGill University, not the University of Ottawa.