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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 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).
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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...
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"No se rinde el gallo rojo, sólo cuando ya está muerto."
$HOME is where the
-- silver_p
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
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.
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.
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.