Cringley: Chip Manufacturing To Radically Change

eshefer writes " This week cringely talks about a company called rolltronics which he claims will make the current microprocessor fabrication on silicon wafers technology defunct in five years. The company uses roll-to-roll printing on plastic (somewhat like newspaper printing presses) making the process much cheaper to produce then current technologies. "

Comments

$15 computers and commericial operating systems

[Bookwyrm]

It would be worth considering that should this scenario come true, it would have an interesting impact on the usages of free-vs-commercial operating systems. If the computer costs $15 to make, people are not going to be spending $80-$100 to put Windows Whatever on it.

On the flip side, if the computers are 'disposable', then this might drive up interest in MS .NET and similiar network-based hosting/application providers as a place to store data and applications on, with the $15 computers being treated as more of an access device than a computer -- the catch would be whether or not the monthly service charges or what have you over the long term were cheaper than buying a 'real'/non-disposable computer with software or not.

Ball Semi also interesting

[warmcat]

Ball Semiconductor have at least as interesting a plan to deposit semiconductors on small spherical surfaces. They have some small gates working already.

How this might not be bad

[Bearpaw]

Rechargeable batteries.

Another company trying to make cheap computers

[Argyle]

There was an interesting Wired Magazine article that discussed the work being done by Paper Computer to make cheap flat computers.

There was a Slashdot article about these guys over a year ago.
-----

Re:Computing hazard

[gmhowell]

Considering how reluctant paper is to disappear down the hole with our lousy 1.5 GPF toilets, I seriously doubt the computer would go anywhere.

GPF=Gallons per Flush

Semicond plastics not suitable for high density

[SysKoll]

This technology is old hat already, the trade press has been writing about it for years.

Advantages:

• supple plastic circuits
• Mostly transparent
• Low cost once the process is established

Drawbacks

• The electron mobility of these plastic semicond junctions suck. So this is good only for low-speed circuits. I'm not sure this is even good enough for the few MHz of CD-A audio decoding.
• Concerns about chemical instability. These plastic circuits will have a low density, a low-cost packaging, and hence offer a huge surface to pollution by environment reactants. Ozone can make holes in the latex of condoms, guess what it can do to a semiconductor thin film exposed to air.

A often-quoted great app is the head-up display for cars: a transparent set of electonic circuits that you glue on your windshield and contains its own display. UV protection films are mandatory for keeping the circuits from burning in the summer, but it looks feasable and cheaper than the usual optical projection solutions.

Don't sell that $12 million 193-nm optical stepper in your silicon fab, though. We're not there yet, especially for medium or high speed circuits.

Not newspaper.. low circulation magazines

[coug_]

Think more along the lines of magazine presses which are less likely to exhibit flaws (in my experience). The production of newspapers is done with less concern about details - as long as the thing is basically readable, no one's going to complain about a $.50 paper and the newspaper presses know this. As the circulation goes down and cost of issue goes up, people are more likely to complain. In this case, the circulation is going to be extremely low - everyone isn't going to be buying a computer every day, week, or month. The company would naturally have to make sure that this roll process is accurate enough that they can limit the number of misprinted computers to an amount that can be recovered by profits without a problem.

Re:sure, we'll solder to plastic circuitry.

[daniell]

This is actually conjuring up an amusing image of someone actually plugging in their soldering iron waiting for it to heat up correctly, and testing and cleaning the tip with a bit of solder. Fully satisfied that the process is well on its way, our hardware hacker touches both the solder end and the coper wire for the battery to the terminals he's so carefully traced through his dead machine. He's looking forward to a new and working machine, and brings the iron down to melt the solder. Before it even gets to the ink terminal on the plastic, the top layer browns, then melts away, exposing the next sensitive layer which quickly does the same as the iron is brought to a contact possition with the wire and solder. Our hacker realizes his error as he reflexivly twitches back; the solder hasn't melted yet, but there's a glob of messy plastic and ink burning to the tip of his iron. For shame, he thinks as toxins fill his notrils, I am so surprisingly stupid. :)

-Daniel

Uh, oh. We've heard this before...

[smoondog]

Sounds like we've been through this path before. Unfortunately, developing new technologies rarely works and just because there is a company dedicated to it doesn't mean much more. Remember 3d protein memory based on lasers and rhodopsin? I'll believe it when I see it.

-Moondog

Re:You have got to be kidding

[Ace905]

"Where to start? The circuit size will drive up power usage and heat generation."

Where to start? Decreasing density leads to better heat dissipation. Changing fabrication materials could mean less heat generation. Size doesn't mean anything so long as no space is wasted; moving outwards in the x axis, instead of adding gates upwards to the y-axis are equivilants. ie: building out instead of up.

Why do you all do it?

[LKH]

Is it an American thing or something? Why is it that I so frequently see the (mis)use of then instead of than. Taco, for one, is well known for doing it, and here we see that a Slashdot reader, who obviously has been around a while, has been sucked into Taco's own version of the English language.

Enough is enough I say! Bring back the 'a' in than!

------

How this could be bad

[Leknor]

Cringley says that the battery will be intergrated into the stamping procedure. This could be _really_ bad in my opinion becuase once the battery runs out so would the "computer".

Lets say you pay for this month's Wired and comes via a wafer-computer. You read it and enjoy the interactive articles and eyecandy. Life seems that much cooler.

Next month you want to re-read that artice. Too bad the battery is dead. Now you gotta pay for last months issue again.

This seem like too much control over content I paid for. We are already bitching about DVD region encoding. At least DVD's don't expire.

Leknor