Cutting the Cords

This is cool:

Plastic sheet delivers wireless power

Desks and walls could one day light up electronics without need for cables.

Annoyed by the tangle of power cords under your desk? A sheet of plastic invented by researchers in Japan could one day make for tables and walls that power devices placed on them — without any need for wires or plugs. Computers could be powered through the desks on which they sit, for example, or flat-screen televisions through the walls where they hang.

The team of seven researchers at the University of Tokyo has produced a sample sheet of the plastic, which is about the size of a very thin magazine — just one millimetre thick and weighing 50 grams. It can deliver up to 40 watts of power to products on or near it that contain a special 'receiving coil': enough to power a lightbulb or a very small laptop. They say that scaled-up production of such sheets could be inexpensive enough for widespread installation in desks, floors, ceilings and walls, ushering in a "new class of electronic devices".

The plastic, described today in Nature Materials1, has as its base a layer of transistor featuring pentacene, an organic molecule whose electrical conductivity can be controlled. Topping that are layers holding copper coils that can sense whether a compatible electronic device is nearby, microelectromechanical-system (MEMS) switches that serve to turn on and off the power, and copper coils to transmit electricity.