2004 MRS Spring Meeting/IUMRS-ICEM 2004 Brings Together Emerging and Established Fields in Materials Research
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MRS NEWS
2004 MRS Spring Meeting/IUMRS-ICEM 2004 Brings Together Emerging and Established Fields in Materials Research The 2004 Materials Research Society Spring Meeting, in conjunction with the International Union of Materials Research Societies’ 9th International Conference on Electronic Materials (IUMRS-ICEM 2004), brought together news on rapidly breaking areas as well as overviews of established fields in materials research. Held April 12–16 in San Francisco, California, the Meeting showed a notable increase in the ways nanomaterials feed into biomaterials. Meeting chairs Israel J. Baumvol (UFRGS, Instituto de Fisica), James J. De Yoreo (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), Siegfried Mantl (Forschungszentrum Jülich), and Thomas X. Neenan (Genzyme Corporation) divided the 28 technical symposia into four clusters: Electronics, Spintronics, and Photonics (Symposia A–L); Nano- and Microstructured Materials (M–S); Molecular, Biological, and Hybrid Materials (T–AA); and General (Symposium X on Frontiers of Materials Research, BB on Education, and CC on Waste Management), all held in the new venue of the Moscone West Convention Center. The Meeting included five days of technical sessions and talks, poster sessions, the awards and plenary session, tutorials, special events, exhibit, and other activities, with more than 2000 papers presented in oral and poster sessions to over 2700 attendees.
MRS BULLETIN/JULY 2004
Technical Talks Are flexible displays ready for “prime time”? Not quite, said K. Allen (iSuppli/ Standford Resources), who gave the first talk in Symposium I. However, progress on all fronts looks promising, she said, with continued development likely to be able to handle foreseeable obstacles. Some challenges remain across the board, from finding a substrate that repeatedly flexes yet retains dimensional stability through temperature changes, to finding a way to get a pattern onto a flexible substrate. While applications, such as electrophoretic dynamic signage, are emerging and are likely to grow through this decade, Allen said that there is no “killer app,” an application that will drive this technology to large-scale commercialization because of its unique need for this solution. While early images touted the idea of roll-to-roll processing, batch processing seems more suited to many likely applications, she said. Also within the realm of flexible electronics, the topic of Symposium I, a big issue in small-molecule LEDs, particularly flexible ones, is the concern of how to
block moisture. With an image of a crumbling wall of bricks trying to hold out a sea of water, P.E. Burrows (PNNL) described just how permeable to water the organic films are. He described a multilayer system that works, although at first glance its success seems unlikely. The alternating layers of polymer and ceramic serve to decouple defects from previous layers (with the planarizing polymer) and to block the flow of moisture (due to the thin aluminum oxide ceramic layer). While equilibrium calculations show that the moisture
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