UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 599-i
House of COMMONS
MINUTES OF EVIDENCE
TAKEN BEFORE
INNOVATION, universities, SCIENCE AND SKILLS COMMITTEE
PLASTIC ELECTRONICS ENGINEERING
WEDNESday 18 jUNE 2008
PROFESSOR SIR RICHARD FRIEND, DR IAN FRENCH AND DR SUE ION
MR MIKE BIDDLE, MR VINCE OSGOOD, MR HERMANN HAUSER
and MRFERGUS HARRADENCE
Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-102
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
1. / This is an uncorrected transcript of evidence taken in public and reported to the House. The transcript has been placed on the internet on the authority of the Committee, and copies have been made available by the Vote Office for the use of Members and others.2. / Any public use of, or reference to, the contents should make clear that neither witnesses nor Members have had the opportunity to correct the record. The transcript is not yet an approved formal record of these proceedings.
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4. / Prospective witnesses may receive this in preparation for any written or oral evidence they may in due course give to the Committee.
Oral Evidence
Taken before the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee
on Wednesday 18 June 2008
Members present
Mr Phil Willis, in the Chair
Dr Roberta Blackman-Woods
Mr Tim Boswell
Mr Ian Cawsey
Dr Ian Gibson
Dr Brian Iddon
Dr Desmond Turner
______
Witnesses: Professor Sir Richard Friend, Cavendish Professor of Physics, University of Cambridge, appearing on behalf of the Institute of Physics, Dr Ian French, Philips Research Laboratories and Dr Sue Ion, Vice President, The Royal Academy of engineering, gave evidence.
Q1 Chairman: Welcome to our first panel of witnesses to the first evidence session on a case study of plastic electronics engineering, which is part of an overall inquiry into engineering which the Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills Committee is undertaking. I welcome in particular Professor Sir Richard Friend who is here on behalf of the Institute of Physics. Welcome to Professor Sue Ion, Vice President of the Royal Academy of Engineering, and an old friend of the Committee - sorry, a friend of the Committee, who is here quite often! Welcome to you, Sue. Last but by no means least, welcome to Ian French of Philips Research Laboratories, who is here representing himself today and certainly is not here in an official capacity on behalf of Philips Research Laboratories.
Dr French: That is correct.
Q2 Chairman: I confess that when plastic electronics was mentioned as an interesting area by Sir David King, at his valedictory session with the Committee, before he stood down as the Government Chief Scientific Adviser, it was he who said that this could be the most exciting development for UK plc. Logystx UK said in evidence to us: “Plastic electronics will disruptively impact every aspect of conventional living across the globe over the next decade.” What did they mean, do you think, Dr French?
Dr French: I think they have taken some basic developments and extrapolated far, far too far. I think that plastic electronics has potential in relatively small areas short-term; and these areas would have to be very successful before it could be extended to much larger areas. For instance, David King said that it could replace silicon chip technology. If that happens, it is beyond 25 years from now and the plastic electronics then will be unrecognisable to the plastic electronics we have today. I think that the case has been very overstated.
Q3 Chairman: Professor Friend, do you share that pessimism of this new exciting technology?
Professor Sir Richard Friend: No, I do not. I think one has to look back to see how radical technologies innovation has been and understand that what we take as technology here for ever is not a wise course of thinking. You can look at almost any aspect of current electronics and reckon that it is a pretty crazy way of making things, and a lot of it is very susceptible to revolution. I do agree with the statement that it would not be wise to try and replace silicon in areas where silicon works very well; but the opportunity is to take electronics into areas where it currently does not play.
Q4 Chairman: Like where?
Professor Sir Richard Friend: At the moment, in order to make a circuit with electronic devices in it, you really have to make it on a very stable, expensive substrate - a slice of a silicon crystal, or a sheet of very expensive glass - and that means that these are prized items that have to be placed carefully and used carefully. If, on the other hand, we can have functionality painted or printed everywhere, then there are huge ranges of applications for semi-conductors that are currently not served.
Q5 Chairman: Dr Ion, does it have remarkable potential to be disruptive technology; in which case, what do you consider is the real potential from your own point of view and from the Academy’s point of view?
Dr Ion: From the Academy’s point of view, and indeed from the view of the Council for Science and Technology, which undertook a report on the plastic electronics area as part of a wider study for strategic decision-making for technology policy last year, we have seen plastic electronics as a disruptive technology, one that would have application in many areas from medical devices right through to retail and fashion, through to potentially new forms of photovoltaic cells - so a very broad spectrum of products and processes together, and therefore worthy of strategic investment by the UK because of the academic lead in many of the essential elements to get towards these products. We thought it had a very large potential. The timescale though, because of the variety of products and processes, is less predictable. Some will come earlier to market and some will come out in 15 or 20 years or maybe beyond a 20-year time frame. That is why we classified it as high potential, high risk in the report that we wrote.
Q6 Chairman: What do you think are the limitations and bottlenecks? We were excited by David King’s vision - and I take the point you are making, Dr French - but let us just get excited for a little while: what are going to be the bottlenecks; what will stop us really making the sort of progress, even over the next 25 years, that these disruptive technologies can bring? I know that Professor Friend may have different views. I am coming to him in a moment.
Dr Ion: Access to capital is a key issue to get you from good laboratory scale work through to a prototype that you can then industrialise. That is true of many areas in the UK where there has been high potential and where traditionally big, vertically integrated companies would have been able to make those kinds of investments. They would swallow the hits as part of their long-term R&D investment and they would get you from lab to prototype, where the design may change significantly in order to industrialise it to enable mass manufacture. That is a bottleneck for this sector. The ability to bring together key players in electronics, electronic design, chemical engineering and material science, in order to deliver you the sort of products that you might envisage is absolutely essential; and it is not clear that the UK has the wherewithal to do that effectively. Initiatives like PETeC up in the north-east have that sort of aim in mind; but whether or not that investment is sufficient or geographically correct or whatever may not be enough.
Q7 Chairman: Dr French - come on now, be more positive here! I am pretty sure that you do see huge disruptive potential for these technologies, but what is holding this back?
Dr French: The main problem for disruptive technologies is always existing technologies. If you want to try and replace the functionality, it is very, very difficult for a disruptive technology to enter. If you want price reduction, you have to think of price reduction of a greater order of magnitude to justify disruptive technology, because existing technologies always improve and always get better and cheaper; so anything you are aiming at now will be reduced. The real opportunity for plastic electronics is in areas where you create new devices that currently do not exist. The first real application for plastic electronics will probably be in flexible displays. There are a lot of technologies being developed to make them in different companies, and there are lots of permutations, but you need a new application area for disruptive technologies to really take hold. Once it is established, and once there is the infrastructure and the knowledge base, then it can probably be spread out sideward. A lot of proposals for what plastic electronics will do, apart from the plastic displays, will be largely for replacement technologies. LCD is getting better and cheaper all the time. Electronics and functionality are getting faster. More and more TFTs, transistors, crowd into smaller areas. It is very difficult for new technologies to come into an area.
Q8 Chairman: Obviously, Professor Friend, displays is an area where this technology is currently envisaged; and yet when we received evidence from the TSB, they did not believe that it would play at the high end of this market; that it would not fit into that high-end space. Do you agree with that?
Professor Sir Richard Friend: If you are looking at where a relatively radical technology is going to get into the market place, it is not going to be, as Ian French has said, as a replacement of something existing; you have to go in with new functionality. The e-books space looks very attractive, where the chance of having something flexible and not breakable and easy to read is very appealing. Once it is established, that will then reduce the cost base or improve the quality of manufacturing. Of that, doubtless other applications will flourish. That has been the pattern all the way through. If one looks at what was done with thin-film silicon that is currently used to make transistors for liquid crystal displays, that was originally produced as a kind of curiosity, as little solar cells in Japan; but it turned out that that gave them the competence to be able to translate it into making areas of transistors. Along came liquid crystals in need of an active matrix backplane technology, and off it went. No-one looking at the state of that early application for amorphous silicon would have foreseen what it turned out to be very important for. We have to recognise that we are at an early stage of this technology. We can identify that there are all those indicators to say that it can be disruptive; that it has reached a level of manufacturing competence that it ought to be able to find its way into some useful products. Beyond that, everything is possible.
Q9 Mr Boswell: Following on from that, I think that the Members of this Committee with a humanities background will be rather tickled to know that e-books are a likely runner, as you have identified. I just wonder if the other two wanted to give their own thoughts about areas that they see as being relevant to this. Could it be, for example, that plastic provides the option for overcoming some of the constraints in relation to medical devices, for example, that might have to use silicon?
Dr Ion: The area of medical devices in its widest sense was an area that was discussed with us when we looked at it - for example, smart bandages, where you are able to put an electronic carrier on that would send signals that are very cheap - and so in health service space, throw-away. That is only one area. There is potential yet to be realised, but medical devices certainly, and wider than I have just described.
Dr French: My main activity is in plastic solar organic(?) cells and we are trying to industrialise it through a Taiwanese company. I spend a lot of time looking for applications. There is a range of smaller specialist applications like intelligent bandages, maybe implantable drip delivery - where having flexible electronics compared to silicon is advantageous in a large area - and plastic imaging. I see potentially lots of small specialist areas that may be more suited for the UK, with high added value. Personally, I do not see any large break-through areas.
Q10 Mr Boswell: I wanted to ask a question about the people end of this in areas of operation, as to whether or not this is research or whether it is realistic to look at long-term manufacturing in the UK because of levels of expertise that are difficult to reproduce elsewhere - but also, given that we are looking at engineering generically, researchers in this field - do they think they are engineers? Do they call themselves engineers and what is their typical profile? Are these materials scientists who have got some electronics or are they electronics specialists who are looking now at materials or something else? What is the pattern of this?
Professor Sir Richard Friend: At the moment this is not a well-recognised mainstream occupation, and the strength is that it has been hiring into it people from many different backgrounds, from chemistry, from materials science and a significant amount of physics, and increasingly from engineering of all sorts. That is one of the areas where the UK does very well; that we do seem to be quick to be able to pull together these different skills.
Q11 Mr Boswell: You can make a team with the various areas of expertise!
Professor Sir Richard Friend: The evidence seems to be that in the larger early-stage industrialisation activities in the UK we have been very successful in hiring really excellent teams that do have this breadth.