Slashdot Mirror
Plastic Valley?
An Anonymous Coward writes: "Welcome to Plastic Valley -
Will the next chip revolution use plastic?" We've run several other stories about making electronics out of plastic - this one suggests that it is 5-15 years away, which I think means approximately the same as "We have no idea if this will ever be feasible".
The plastic in question is pentacene, and it has also been used to make Efficient Plastic Solar Cells. Efficiency is only aroud 2%, a far cry from silicon's 15%, but if they made all the plastic food containers out of it, maybe they could use it as a supplemental supply in California. :-)
This makes me sick. A clear conscience because the item is so cheap, it doesn't matter if you throw it away??? What about the cost to the rest of us? I hate this attitude of disposible this, disposible that. I don't want a disposible camera, I don't want disposible paper plates, and I certainly don't want a disposible processor.
Convenience shouldn't be our ultimate goal. Just because we can, doesn't mean we should.
check your average inkjet printer, the head is connected to the rest of the electronics by what exactly ?
WHAT?
I tend to find that I can throw things away with a clear conscience if I know that they're going to rot down or get recycled. Of course geeks are good recyclers since they always keep (and use) old computers.
There is a tradeoff between power consumption (when new powersaving tech is introduced) and keeping and old machine but this is still worrying. Indeed, it's almost as bad as the disposable mobile phone thing.
The high tech solution to this is lots of nice nanobots that will separate out the metal / plastic from such devices and leave us with big piles of raw materials to use again. Anyone with an electron microscope that can put some together? ;)
Enough rant for today ....
gpig
If people start over-clocking these babies, we'll need good ventilation. Can you imagine the discussions? "Dude, my motherboard melted all over my hard drive." ... Green for bottles, blue for cans, yellow for disposed circuitry.
Or recylcing plants
If we run out of oil we do NOT run out of feedstocks for making plastic.
Everything in petroleum oil can be found, and refined from, plants.
Henry Ford once envisioned cars made of plastic refined from soybeans grown by local farmers. He went so far as to actually produce a soybean plastic Model T.
Linoleum is made from plant oils.
You have grown up in a petroleum centric society, but petroleum isn't the only way to achieve everything we do now. Free you mind, and the rest will follow.
"Why certaintly sir. May I inquire as to why you are dissatisfied?"
"It Hz..."
Imagine the "Tupperware Party" of 2030...
"And this handy little storage bowl not only has an easy-lock lid, but it can also be located with its onboard GPS tracking system in case a friend 'forgets' to return it!"
------
Let me give you the lowdown
If that were the case, I don't understand how new chips 1/3rd that size can sell for $60 at retail. Is the figure wrong?
>>And all of these gadgets would be so cheap you could throw them away with a clear conscience.
Oh you could, could you? What were these gadgets made from again? Did you say *plastic*? Why not advocate RECYCLING?
Also, which is more plentiful, sand or oil? Granted, plastic "would reduce the fragility and bulk of screens," making larger screens feasible. Believe me, I have wanted a wall screen for a long time. Heck, why *shouldn't* my house mimick a living entity 24/7?
But despite the fact that "making any grade of silicon is a difficult, time-consuming, and pricey endeavor" and "the cost of [producing it] is steep", why is there no mention of the relative difficulty and cost of obtaining more oil to produce plastics? Perhaps plastic is the future for this type of application. However, the attitude that clear consciences can be created by discarding non-biodegradable materials is repulsive.
Sure, it sounds cheap at 0.05 €, but exchange rates makes it sound a lot cheaper than it might actually be. Consider, for example, that you'd need to shell out roughly 31,500 Turkish Lira to get one of these puppies!
Doesn't sound so cheap anymore, huh?
information wants to be expensive...nothing is so valuable as the right information at the right time.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Now if they'll only make laser printers that can print directly to phenolic or epoxy boards we could give mom's steam iron back :-)
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Free hardware... can the GPL handle it? ;-)
Monkey sense
A ROLLABLE computer.
Think about it. You can print a monitor AND all computer circuits on a sheet of plastic.
Print it on a sheet of flexible plastic two by three feet, you now have a monitor the size of a standard poster, with ALL the computer electronics included, that you can roll up and put in a mailing tube that weighs nearly nothing detached from its power brick.
The notebook computer becomes obsolete and is replaced by the "placemat" computer. Indeed, the placemat at your table at Denny's may well be the computer you place your order on and then procede to have a frag fest with the cute girls in that booth over there. Dishwasher safe even.
E-books become a simple sheet of flexible lexan. Light, durable, AND damn near crunchable.
Entire PC's will be able to be laminated onto virtually any surface, of any shape or texture.
PC on a sphere? No problem. PC on a natural rock formation? No problem. PC on your FOREHEAD? Again, no problem.
I'm currently building a PC that is entirely contained within a desktop. You plug the monitor directly in a jack on the back of the desktop. The drive slots are on the front of the desktop, etc. I'm attempting to do this with standard *desktop* componants. No notebook tricks. It isn't exactly building the Saturn V, but it isn't an insignificant engineering task either.
Think about this, in the future it may be possible for me to embed such a computer * in the FINISH of the desktop. *
No, I'm sorry, durability, per se, isn't the issue. The issue is the whole new world of usability and ubiquity
In the future it is quite possible that the * shrink wrap * an item you buy is packaged in will be more technologically advanced than the item itself.
Well, actually, these plastics are very particular and fussy plastics, it's not like you can just pick up an old polyethylene bottle, melt it down and make chips from it. Moreover, this is hardly going to be a large-volume industry, chips do not suck up the same mass of plastic as a soda bottle.
One of the first times I heard that my mind was on a zillion other things and for a moment I thought they were asking if I was paying with cash or a credit card.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
How much use in reality will plastic chips have?
I see people already saying that they will not replace standard CPUs but come on folks where will this have use?
Is this going to a brakthrough only to see the light of day in small battery driven devices or what?
The curious cowards and the tasteless trolls want to know.
ACK
The official site is http://www.nobel.se/.
And while we are on the subject of plastics, this is also pretty cool. Instead of "lab on a chip" they are building a lab-on-a-CD. "The technology is already being exploited by Gyros, a spin-off created earlier this year by Amersham Pharmacia Biotech of Sweden. Gyros is betting that plastic compact discs are a better platform for future chemical and biological microdevices than are silicon chips. Apart from being much cheaper than silicon wafers, plastic discs are more compatible with biochemical substances. Also, embossing techniques for putting microstructures on a CD's surface already exist, so there is no need to reinvent the wheel."
In fact, the whole damn Technology Quarterly from The Economist is pretty damn interesting. I tried to get it submitted, but...(insert standard "Slashdot never posts my stories whine).
************************************************ ** *
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
First we have to stop burning so much of our plastic garbage and start recycling it cause if we now find yet another use for plastic, the oil reserves will deplete even faster. I know people have been saying for several decades "Soon we'll be out of oil" and then they find a new place to drill, but the oil is limited and does not "regenerate" at the same speed that we use it...
--
"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
I don't believe a word of this. The hard and expensive part of making a chip is photolithography and ion-implantation, i.e. actually building a circuit on top of the subtrate. The reason that silicon is the most commonly used bulk for making chips isn't really because it is a "good" semiconductor - it's not at all! (Although its oxide SiO2 has some desirable properties which make the etching process easier to do on a large scale.)
:)
The reason they use silicon is because IT'S CHEAP! IT IS JUST (refined) SAND! Far better would be Gallium Arsenide or some similar compound. But that is orders of magnitude more expensive to do in volume (at the moment).
Flexible circuits?!? I'll believe that when I see it. You couldn't make any IC without using metal layers to route busses around at the higher levels (note: the metal which carries signals around between the transistors is a conductor, NOT a semiconductor!). So, until they find a substance which is flexible, a good conductor at operating temperatures AND which you can deposit on the rough surface of a thin wafer with deep sub-micron accuracy...
...I wouldn't invest in any startups claiming to pioneer this technology without reading the small print.
These sigs are more interesting tha
If I could build my own transistors, things get very interesting. If I can build transistors myself, that means I can print a gate array to spec.
Heck, I could even print my own CPU, FPU, or whatever... the GPL coverage of printed hardware could be very interesting. ;-)
Now I can focus on my ideas from 10 years ago with programmable cells that operate on one bit at a time, talking to their neighbors in a grid... 1,000,000 single bit computers working in parallel... move over Beowolf, hello task specific metahardware. The future is fun!
--Mike--
Anyway, the roadmap goes out for about 15 years, and has some startling predictions (chips will run at .6-.8 volts, but will need about 200W of power) and it covers everything from processors to memory to everything else. Like, ALL the parameters. It's very comprehensive.
So, why should you look at it to see what's going to happen in the next 15 years? Because the ITRS is extremely important for the industry. All the chip manufacturers, all the test equipment manufacturers, all the materials manufacturers... they all look at the ITRS to see what they need to work on. The Silicon industry is made up of hundreds of companies, and in order to get them all to meet up at the same place to continue making faster stuff, they need to all be working towards the same goal... and so they all follow the ITRS, for the most part.
That's not to say that you won't see some new technologies pop in, but the ITRS is typically dead-on for most stuff.
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
Another technology that's been 10-15 years away...
for the last 30 years, or so.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Why wasn't there any mention of this in "The Road Ahead"?
Plastic IC's? Holographic storage?
Slashdot
speculation for nerds. speculation that matters.
"My mother never saw the irony in calling me a son-of-a-bitch." - Jack Nicholson
Some of the things Ken Hom says about europeans are pretty offensive
The original Doctor Dark.
> Unfortunately, scientists have yet to stabilize
> the materials, which deteriorate quickly when
> exposed to air.
what worries me about this is how they keep bringing up the word 'ORGANIC' -- and then just tout the technical benefits of using LIVING MATTER, without ever a question to what it is they're actually doing to living things.
i mean - like regular materials don't 'DETERIORATE QUICKLY WHEN EXPOSED TO AIR' -- because they're not alive and growing. they want the living stuff to just GROW - BE USEFUL - and DON'T DIE -- on a massive scale. this seems to me to show a tremendous amount of disrespect for living things. i imagine they're only using MOLD or BACTERIA or some such, but doesn't anyone care if they're houseplants DIE? if we can hook up wires to a plant, and then eek the life out of it with electricity - well some people may not care, but its a bit like not telling people if they're eating genetically modified foods -- if you don't take care of your cell-phone, the PLANT in it will whither and die -- NO?
Excactly.
Jonathan
This is my world and I am...
Don't we have enough problems with all the plastic that gets put into our dumps now? Do we really want cheap, desposeable(SP?) chips? We'd have to start a "recycle your old chips" campaign.
At the next eco-hypocrisy-meeting, count the private jets used to get to the meeting. Should be interesting to see that
Let's hope that it'll stay cool -- burning styrofoam isn't a very pleasant scent (nor is it good for the enviroment!) :)
Mike Roberto
- GAIM: MicroBerto
Berto
Is there any other information about this? Where is the supporting research?
This is my world and I am...
Geek: Dude, Xmass has been over for months ditch the tree already. All this tinsle crap around too.
Geek2: That's no tree that a....
In a rare fit of good taste I stop
Hmm , I do think this is possible but I can only think of one good reason why we'd use them - flexible circuits, maybe i just have a limited imagination. I figure that the good (smart) people at AMD/Transmeta/Intel have a good reason not to use plastics in chip design (short of the fact that you'd have to use a very high melting point plastic =)).
--
Jon - TheSpork
And come out with Ghz plastic underpants.
Liberty.
I'll believe it when I see it...unlike religion where people start seeing shit after they start believing it.
Lets hope it's Mircowave and Dishwasher safe.
I suppose now we'll be expected to OC our processors into oblivion before trashing them to make sure no "really really really small animals" (ala Particle man? o_O) get caught in the gates, just like they have us do with 6 pack plastic containers.
;-)
Of course, I'll avoid the obvious sexual implications
Information is the catalyst for revolution
Up until 10 years ago, electronics hobbyists would get circuit diagrams from magazines and 'transcribe' them onto breadboards. In the last 10 years, PCB layouts have started showing up more often in magazines and websites that would be printed to a transparency to make a professional looking PCB to plug components into.
10 years from now, perhaps circuits will be downloadable and printable straight to paper, without needing any components! Think about it, using primer coats in between, you could potentially print 10+ layers on a single piece of paper. If this is what the hobbyists will be doing, imagine what the rest of electronics will look like?
Perhaps solid state will mean exactly that, dense bricks of integrated electronics.
'No user servicable parts' will be more then a casual discouragement to warranty breakers, it'll be a way of life.
Move over, Brittany Spheres.
Sometimes nothing is a real cool hand.
Are you listening?
"Plastics".
Jacco /var/log
---
# cd
-------
Warning: Slashdot may contain traces of nuts.
The way science works these days is that you don't get any funding if you can't demonstrate that your idea is likely to make a lot of money within a decade.
Deep thought and systematic research that spans over decades is long gone and dead and has been replaced by "science" of spin-off high tech companies and marketing. And the reason I'm posting AC? I work for one of these companies.
Hang on. Those are all good things. Carry on...
************************************************ ** *
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Just imagine - you're walking down the street and every advert (including posters glued to walls) will have movement.
Animated images - HTML's worst practice transfered to the real world
Did everyone forget about the paper computer article that appeared on Slashdot some time ago?
And so it goes.
They look for printing as a cheap manufacturing technique of polymer displays. I asked Friend if polymers could take over silicon in other areas of electronics like CPUs, he said they would be far too slow for that. But maybe some day..
Anyway, the polymer displays look interesting, for one thing the viewing angles are not limited at all. And imagine a tiny laptop with a decent sized roll-up display..
--
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
www.ridiculopathy.com
Why is it that we do not hear any news about the manufacture of electronics using cement? With the proper doping and selection of architecture we could make our sidewalks into HUGE and unwieldy radios and other deathtrap devices. Now THAT would be science...
Nope.. that's why most red/yellow/black/green people just hate white ones :)
Heh...
DO NOT LEAVE IT IS NOT REAL
No, I still see metal, perhaps more exoctic than
CMOS, as chips get ever more powerful.
CMOS has been dominant for the past 25 years,
mainly fir the amount of device intergration.
Bipolar and GaAS had speed niches, but never
approached the commerical device count.
People are still trying however.
Forget plastic the future is styrofoam.
Just wait until X-Mas morning when you open up that package and inside is your brand new AMD styrofoam CPU that just hit the market. Of course it will be packed in old Pentium IIIs.
rr
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur.
I think I remember talking about this hmmm let me thinkk http://slashdot.org/articles/00/10/17/1750244.shtm l
People believe in something and strive towards it and only then are they able to build or achieve that shit. If it hadn't been so we wouldn't have reached this advanced state of development.
There's always sufficient, but not always at the right place nor for the right folks.
Philips Research Labs in Eindhoven, the Netherlands (aka "Natlab") is working on it for quite some time now. And it's looking quite promicing. They have a working prototypes now. But it lags on allmost every point: Computational speed, minituralization, and (for the moment) cost. The problem is getting it to market. It will NEVER compete with silicon on the computational speed bit (the conductance of plastic just isn't high enough) so they are aiming on the cost bit(cheaper than 0.05 euro a pice) which is theoretically possible. Result: Disposable computer chips... Mmm. I'll have a side order of PolyLED screens they're making.
When I go to the computer store, will they ask the same question I hear at the grocery check-out line?
"Will that be paper or plastic, sir?"
(paper cellphones last week, silicon plastic this week... )
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Plastics used in chips (i.e. Conductive Polymers), aren't suitable for *all* chipset uses. Polymers will be used in things like thin display units, etc. The versatility of polymers shines in printable chipsets, but as far as conductivity and other factors go, plastics are not up to par. Copper will be the *element* used most in motherboards, etc.