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

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.