Professor Henning Sirringhaus is either very lucky, very good,
or both. A man who got started in physics with the abstract idea of
working on renewable energy, he has gone via a PhD in thin film
silicon to leading a research group developing plastic
electronics.
The move would not be particularly remarkable if it happened
today, but in 1998 plastic electronics was a newborn research area
with an uncertain future. Uncertain enough for Sirringhaus's PhD
supervisor at Princeton to question his sanity on taking a
postdoctoral position with Sir Richard Friend in Cambridge
University's Cavendish Lab. There was obviously risk involved in
entering such a field, but Sirringhaus clearly is not satisfied
with being bored.
"Thin film silicon is a relatively mature area, there are not so
many interesting things you can do," he recalls. "Polymer
electronics was a very immature, young field at the time. On the
fundamental science side there were some interesting things to
understand, and then also obviously there was the technological
potential."
Today, with that technological potential proved, it is possible
to claim that Sirringhaus was lucky to pick a field that delivered
on its promise. But he has helped it to deliver, both as v-p for
research at Plastic Logic - the Cambridge start-up in the vanguard
of firms pushing the processing, materials and architectural
technology - and as leader of his own group in the Cavendish
Lab.
It is obvious in conversation that the work, with its potential
to affect people through products such as electronic paper,
satisfies Sirringhaus for similar reasons to those for which
renewable energy once appealed. "There aren't many fields where you
take basic research and very quickly have the chance to affect
people's lives," he admits.
The key areas in which plastic electronics are predicted to have
that effect are RFID tags and displays. In the former case, the
attraction lies in the possibility of inkjet printing tags in high
volume at low cost, enabling them to be used on all manner of
goods. In the second, it is the technology's ability to handle
flexible substrates, especially since amorphous silicon is limited
in this respect.
"There is a lot of interest in displays, active matrix displays
and particularly flexible displays," says Sirringhaus. "Electronic
paper, these bistable displays, require an active matrix driver -
you can't drive them with a passive matrix. There is some real
potential that the printing approach will be able to deliver a
solution not merely based on lower cost, but to be an enabling
technology," he says.
However, if this potential is going to be realised, researchers
such as Sirringhaus need the funding to continue to develop
architectures and improve the performance of the materials. Given
his status - he won last year's Royal Society Mullard Award for
'research that has the potential to make a contribution to the
national prosperity of the UK' - you might think cash arrives in
big parcels in the morning post. Not so.
"We are currently concerned about the level of funding for
fundamental academic research," he says. "Many of the recent
initiatives, such as the EU integrated projects tend to be
industry-led, and focused on applied research, which is a good
thing in principle, but it also generates quite some concern for
funding of core, fundamental research in universities, at the level
required to remain competitive internationally."
The DTI funding schemes following on from the LINK projects are
also more industry-led, and funding for basic research from the
Research Councils is not increasing. What's more, Research Council
funding is so competitive that Sirringhaus says the success rate
for grant applications - even if they are evaluated and rated
positively - is currently not very high.
He does, however, reserve praise for the DTI's £90m,
six-year Micro and Nanotechnology Manufacturing Initiative for
research and facilities development, launched last year, which he
says could help the UK make some real money out of its
research.
"This initiative for capital projects, the UK needs something
like that. There are a lot of areas, like the polymer electronics
area, where very interesting research has been done of high
international standing. I think the challenge is to take that to
the next step. Of course we have to see how it comes out, but I
think it is a very useful initiative."
Maybe, then, some good news for those looking for the Government
to put some financial commitment into exploiting the new wave of
ambitious science being developed in the UK.
As we leave the lab Sirringhaus, for whom the path from physics
for renewable energy to inkjet printing of semiconducting polymers
appears to have run smoothly, is explaining how he arrived in
Cambridge, from Zurich, via Princeton. He is clearly excited by his
work, but after a short while he turns and says: "I never did get
to work on photovoltaics." It's hard to believe he regrets it.