From Chris Moran, who runs Applied Ventures, AMAT's internal VC unit, during his introductory minipresentation: "I couldn't bring a sample with me because the machine we make for solar weighs 500 tons. I heard an interesting statistic a few weeks ago that we [AMAT] now use more aluminum than Boeing in the production of our equipment for solar than it does in their airplanes."

From Mike McCreary, E Ink's VP of research and advanced development and chair of the US Display Consortium's board, commenting on careers in semi, PV, and PE: "I think there's a dearth of American bright kids going into the sciences today, compared to when I grew up. I think going into any hard science, even if you end up in business, even if you end up eventually in medicine, even if you end up as a venture capitalist, will serve these kids well. It's alot easier to learn business as a physicist than it is to learn physics with a business degree."

Mike: "I've been in the [Plastic Logic] facility. For those of you who don't know, they're using ink-jet printers to print their various layers and then using differential surface energies to have them spread out accurately to the lines. When you build a factory like that as opposed to a semiconductor factory, you don't need the whole basement for all the facilities, for the vacuum pumps, your gas containment, all that. The facility, if you walked in there, is much much more simple, much lower cost, and much more flexible than a standard semiconductor facility. So this is a game changer."

Marc Baldo, professor of electrical engineering at MIT and the school's Laboratory of Organic Optics and Electronics: "I'd like to say something quickly from a technical point of view about those transistors. For those of you who don't much about these plastic transistors, they're extremely low performance. The mobilities of these materials will be 0.1 or much less, maybe 10 to the minus 3. So they're actually very bad transistors. They have bad on-off ratios, everything about them is really crummy." (crowd laughs)

Mike: "I need a rebuttal to this!"

Marc: "What they've done successfully is found a niche for it. But alot of people are looking at it, and saying, longer term one of the golden rules of people like me, is don't go head to head with silicon, because if silicon can do it, they'll crush you. I think it's still up to be debated whether Plastic Logic will succeed because fundamentally they are doing something with a material that is not optimal, these materials are not good at transporting charge. So they're getting as good as they can out of them, but I think we'll see what happens with the technology."

Mike: "There are people with organic transistors that have shown [mobility] performance of 1.0 and even higher, with new materials and other techniques that are going into that. On top of that, they're are people who are talking about mixed oxides, zinc oxides, and other materials that are even higher mobility and there still alot of issues to overcome, but those also show alot of promise. I have held backplanes in my hands that have much higher performance than 10 to the minus 2."

Odin Soli, Aveso Displays' director of business development, answered: "What's really interesting to us, and I don't know how typical this is across the entire customer base for silicon, at the end of the day, this [printed electronics] is going to be the commercial revolution in banking, in wallets and purses.... If you notice (he holds up a card with an Aveso minidisplay embedded in it), this is 800 microns thick. So right off the bat, any type of packaged silicon is not going to fit, you're not going to be able to get it into an ISO-compliant card.

"Basically, everything that we've been involved in with silicon, we've been dragging, well not necessarily dragging, but certainly sourcing bare die. That obviously is a place where out of general purpose micros, that's not the most difficult thing to do, but in cases of discretes or real-time clocks, etc., there are alot of segments in the silicon space now where you cannot cost effectively get bare die and process those. That's certainly one pain point that we currently have.

"...You're also looking at basically a closed power budget for this particular product. So you're dealing with a very, very limited power budget and obviously in our opinion there are not enough ultra-low-power silicon components out there for us to integrate into these products. So that's another thing that we're doing, we're working to push silicon manufacturers to continue their low-power development. And preferably really cheap too."

"No. (laughter...then a few moments later...) If I could expand on my answer just a little bit. There is solar integrated into cars today for off-key power. The sunroof will open up and turn on a fan and pull the hot air out on a hot day, and that enables car manufacturers to downsize the size of their compressor, and thereby get higher gas mileage and things of that sort. I'll think you'll see those kind of integrations in solar, but for motive power, no.