Metaboards and Pinless Chips (Printed Electronics Europe 2013)

• Metamaterials offer new propagation modes for the distribution of data and power.

• Digital system PCBs are dominated by bus lines, hard to recycle and increasingly costly.

• Replacing the 'custom' PCB with a universal power and data transfer structure (the Metaboard) lowers costs and offers end of life recycling as working components.

• Metaboards CAN be built using metamaterials carrying magneto-inducutive waves offering solder free assembly, environmental tolerance and protection.

Christopher J. Stevens received the B.Sc. degree in physics (with first class honors) and D.Phil. degree in condensed matter physics from The University of Oxford, Oxford, U.K., in 1990 and 1994, respectively. He was then with Universita Degli Studidi Lecce, where he was involved with the properties of wide-bandgap semiconductor materials, followed by a Post-Doctoral Fellowship with the Clarendon Laboratory, where his work focused on the dynamic properties of high-temperature superconductors, after which he held a Royal Academy of Engineering Fellowship with St Hugh's College, Oxford, U.K. During this period, he developed a number of novel devices based on kinetic inductance and photomixing effects. He now holds an Engineering Science faculty position with The University of Oxford and is a Fellow of St. Hugh's College. His current research activities include ultrawideband communications, metamaterials, ultrafast nanoelectronics, and high-speed electromagnetics.

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