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.

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.

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