Growing Organic Mobile Phones
[Applause]
good evening ladies and gentlemen
thank you for such a nice introduction
and it’s actually a pleasure
to be talking today about a topic that
is very close to me both personally and
professionally
which is climate change and i’ll
probably try and talk about it from a
very
very very nerd point of view if the
glasses have not given it away by now i
don’t know what will i am a nerd
so let’s start with that so
let me ask a question how many of you
remember the first thing you did
when you woke up this morning i know
what i did
i checked my mobile phone actually have
a confession to make i check it even
before i brush my teeth
let me be honest i actually do it while
brushing my teeth sometimes if i’m
running late
even if you did not check it the first
thing in the morning i’m sure you use it
to
navigate to work order food or just
check news
even the pandemic was a little more
bearable for all of us because we were
able to connect with our loved ones
and of course the hilarious social media
videos are always
a plus technology is highly integrated
into our lives
right and according to a research there
are about 50.1 billion electronic
devices that are connected and are
online at the moment
that is more than seven times the number
of human beings on this planet
and out of those 50.1 billion 3.5
billion are smartphones
just in 2020 and that number
will go up by another 300 million next
year
now that’s a lot of mobile phones as i
was coming in
to get mic’d up and start with my talk i
actually counted the number of
electronic devices the tech support team
had
i counted 21 and that is just the
devices they have now
how many of these devices they would
have had in the last 10 years
how many of these devices all of us
would have had in the last 10 years
just extrapolate that number globally
now
right and that is electronic technology
it’s surrounding us
we use it for everything from doing
simple things like taking photographs
to analyzing complex data at work we use
it for literally everything
what has led to this and i started
asking like
why this has happened why do we feel the
need to keep upgrading our technology
very quickly and in some cases even
every year
the answer is here sorry for the very
technical graph but what it shows
is the increasing processing power of
our electronic devices these days
that we have the most high-tech
processors in
electronic devices today can actually do
10 trillion calculations per second
and that number was only at a million 50
years ago we have
doubled our processing capabilities
every year and that has allowed us to do
amazing things
stream high quality videos take even
better pictures
analyze all the data that is coming from
satellites we have been able to do that
but look at this picture a bit more
closely in 2020 it actually tells a
different story
we are at the cusp of the next
technological evolution in the
electronic industry
self-driving cars are almost here humans
are trying to go to mars
medical practitioners are trying to have
better technology to detect diseases
the current computing technology is
saturated and will not be able to
support that
what would be the next quantum leap in
technology
will it be dna computing quantum
computing
or finally will we have singularity
where the robots take over the world and
we don’t know what to do with it
but before i try and answer that
question tonight let’s just park that
problem for a second
let’s just take a step back let’s just
have a think
about all the steps we have taken to be
where we are today
let’s just think of all the devices we
have already made
how many of you know where your old
phones are lying in a closet somewhere
i have a bottom drawer everybody has a
bottom drawer where all the old mobile
phones go
right have you ever thought what happens
to all your discarded electronic devices
when they are outdated and old they all
end up
here and then here
electronic waste according to some
research
the second most dangerous waste in the
world after nuclear waste
and we have no idea how to get rid of it
let’s just put some numbers on it just
in 2019
all of us collectively around the globe
produced about 55
million tons of electronic waste
increased urbanization
increased spending capabilities shorter
lifespan of electronic devices just to
make them cheap
have all been contributing to massive
amounts of electronic waste that we
produce around
the globe that number will go up to 75
million just in the next decade and
what’s baffling
is only eight percent of that is
recycled
the rest of the amount is unaccounted
for
or goes into landfill now let me just
put a context to that number i really
like this picture
just in 2016 we produced about 45
million tons of electronic waste that is
4500 eiffel towers made out of
electronic waste
that was just produced that year now
that means
every country on this planet can have 20
of these eiffel towers
i’m not sure if they will look as pretty
as the actual one in paris
but each country had to have 21 of those
some of it is recycled but recycling
requires even more energy
we have to invest energy to recycle some
of the products that are already in
there
so putting them into landfill is no
option in fact some of the states and
territories in australia
have actually had legislations where you
cannot dump electronic waste into
landfill
why because of harmful materials like
cadmium
arsenic lead mercury silicons and other
plastics
which go into the soil and then into a
waterways and come back to us
as food and cause chronic diseases of
the mind heart and central nervous
system and so on and so forth
so dumping electronic waste is not an
option for us anymore
so now we have a two-phase problem
how do we go to the next evolution of
technology
but at the same time how do we do it
without generating all the waste we have
so far
and that’s a problem that inspired me to
undertake the research i do
in my early years of studying
nanomaterial science and quantum physics
i was inspired by a lot of scientists
who were very very inspiring to
promote sustainable research a
technology that supports
the next leap of human evolution but at
the same time is not harming the
environment
that’s where my team and i we turned
towards nature for inspiration
we started looking at naturally
occurring materials
that would probably serve as
semiconductors and we can make our
electronic devices out of those
so that they might not harm the
environment and that’s where we came
across the concept of organic
semiconductors
we started developing a new class of
organic semiconductors
made from just naturally occurring
carbon and hydrogen
these materials can be recycled several
times and are naturally biodegradable
and can replace all of the electronic
devices in this room
the way we grow them is a very
interesting concept which i’m going to
talk about but i want you to have a look
at
the molecular structure of the material
called pentascene on the screen to your
left
we were able to grow these materials
after several years of optimizations
doing several permutations and
combinations where we came across this
material
which we were able to grow with the
precise thickness of one
carbon atom and that
was one of the things that we were
actually working hard for the last five
years to achieve
we started growing them by a process
called chemical vapor deposition
which is physically stacking one atom
over the other one molecule over the
other in a controlled environment in a
furnace
just like 3d printing but we did it with
atoms
and this gives them the flexibility to
be bent into any shape
like this and this was one of the very
interesting properties we started
discovering with these materials
because they’re so thin they can be bent
into any shape like a flexible piece of
paper
that you might have the thickness of
these materials as you saw
is actually only three nanometers that
is 100 times
thinner than a single strand of human
hair
as strong as steel and they can hold
about a million circuits
in the size of your fingernail
while we were growing and optimizing
these semiconductors
we actually came across a very
interesting property because i still
haven’t answered the question
whether this will be the next
technological leap i can’t claim so at
all
i don’t think it would be i have a lot
of things to do but
we have a lab scale prototype this is an
actual image from my lab
where these organic semiconductors have
been made into a lab scale prototype
or a transistor which is the processing
unit in any of the electronic devices
that we use today
it’s too hard to be seen you would need
a microscope to see it uh we used a
pretty good camera to get the image
but you would need a microscope to see
what an actual semiconductor looks like
because it’s only one carbon atom thick
but this does not answer the question i
started my talk with earlier in the
evening
will this be the next leap which takes
us to the next generation of computing
and in order to find this answer we were
doing a lot of experiments we were
trying to discover the properties of
these materials see if they have
something interesting
because they had the biodegradable
aspect to them and that’s where we came
across this
these materials actually have an amazing
property
they can convert electricity into light
and light into electricity
in about one trillionth of a second
that’s how fast they can convert light
into electricity
and this opened a whole new plethora of
opportunities and avenues for start
using these materials
in a lot of interesting things we have
already started prototyping and building
leds
which would serve as flexible displays
foldable e-papers or even solar cells
that can be integrated onto your clothes
or onto your backpack
and that can start to charge your
devices the flexibility of these
materials gives us an
opportunity to start developing
electronic devices
that have the capability to do what we
need them to do
but are they powerful enough think back
about it
why do we call the devices we use today
electronics
we call them electronics because they
run on electricity to process
information and carry data
these materials on the other hand they
use light
or photons and light travels much faster
than electricity
making the performance of these devices
a thousand times faster
than the best computers we have out
today and that’s why
the devices that would be made out of
these materials will actually not be
called electronic devices
they would be called photonic devices
this is just a figurative representation
of what a photonic circuit looks like
where we can control the photons or the
light as they move across the material
and have
memory work as transistors do the
processing for us
and everything around an electronic
device and this was particularly
interesting
for mobile phones because that’s
something i’m very passionate about as
well
because do you remember the time when
you had your first mobile phone
i remember was probably 12 years ago
when my parents actually allowed me to
have one
i have bought eight since then not to
mention
three computers two laptops a tablet a
smartphone and a kindle
if you count that as an electronic
device so lots of electronic devices
so we thought this material can emit
light
and this material can emit as a
processing unit and that’s what your
phone is
your phone is a screen which is emitting
light and a processing chip
sitting behind this material can act as
both
and that’s where we have the opportunity
to develop fully flexible organic mobile
phones
that would be completely biodegradable
now imagine
having a mobile phone like this wrapped
around your wrist in a few years
made from completely organic
semiconductors
can do processing as quick as a
supercomputer you can literally be
carrying a supercomputer folded like
a pocket square with you at all times
and when this one gets outdated
you can throw it away with your garden
waste or use it for fertilizer
and more importantly you will never have
to worry about a cracked screen
on your mobile phone mobile phones and
electronic devices made from these
organic semiconductors
are one of the ways are one of the few
attempts that we are trying to achieve
the next level of technological
evolution
so that it can keep supporting our human
lives as we know it
but at the same time does not harm the
environment
this is my attempt thank you so much
ladies and gentlemen
you