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How Printable Computers Will Work
Gart points to this article on printable computers, an "Illustrated narrative [that] shows how users will simply download microchip designs from the Internet and print out a working ink-based, plastic processor on a desktop fabrication machine, similar to an ink jet printer." This is a nicely lucid account, and straightforward about the reasons that you probably won't start printing out a new motherboard this evening. Still, a glimpse of the future; this is one technology it will be cool to watch emerge from vapor.
Um... E-Paper is little plastic balls in oil held inside very small bubble wrap. I don't think there are very many ways to make electrical connections in that model.
So in a few years time my 19" Server Rack will be full of paper...kewl
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Babes for the geek: babes.foobla.com
This won't take off unless the machine can make much more interesting things than single chips. 99% of the world has no interest in hardware hacking.
I remember seeing articles and discussions about open source hardware here on /. With this process, such an idea could easily come to fruition. People could develop their own platforms based on their own model, or a model they downloaded and modified to their ends.
Just like GNU or BSD software, and what have you.
Of course, there'll be the shareware hardware, where someone will want to charge $15 for crap that doesn't work. Imagine the license agreement - "Please send $15 to: xxx, or this hardware will self-destruct in 30 days."
But really, the open source hardware idea would work here. People with an interest in hardware could really get down to the nitty gritty and see how things work.
-kidlinux.
Four.
The person giving the seminar (her name escapes me right now) pointed out that right now, the electron mobilities in these materials prevents you from making fast devices. She envisioned eventually getting them up to monitor frequencies (a few kHz).
Her joke on the matter was that right now, they might be able to print out a 60 Hz Pentium. Don't expect high speed electronic systems from this stuff in the near future.
Besides, a better use for these materials might be in photovoltaics, if they can make junctions that undergo photoelectric effect in the infrared.
Oh dear.. gives 'cybersex' a whole new meaning ..
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Delphis
A just looked at Amazon and didn't find any book that fitted your description. Can you tell me the name of the author - or, much better: the ISBN?
tnx,
Jo
Hi! I'm the infamous
The name is actually "A For Anything", now I found it at Amazon, the author is Damon Knight, published by Cascade Mountain Publishing; ISBN: 1892884011.
Jo
Hi! I'm the infamous
How about a self printing printer! You don't even need to design it, because it'll design and print itself!
And he whines about the cost of the Tektronix ink. Wait until he sees this stuff.
What's your damage, Heather?
the future won't hold motherboards because they are too clumsy. Think about it, all it does is connect _usefull_ things (videocard, memory, etc), but in itself it has no value. Designs and silicon, able to connect wirelessly or maybe with a few connectors is going to do the job.
nosig today
:)
I think this is rather important. What really made the open source software movement take off was the fact that it had a very very low barrier of entry. Anyone at all could sit down and write code and contribute to the project. Open Source Hardware (imho) won't work until anyone can d/l the source, tinker a bit and play with it.
... And this is the perfect vehicle to let people do that. Sure we can't develop then next x86 processor with this technology. But the geek down the road might have a hunk of plastic that he's developed to control the lights in your house, or a new USB you plug into your computer that appears as some neato device.
Assuming ubiquitous printer technology capable of printing even primitive logic circuits, how hard could it be (with the right "ink" and paper) to print off some completely convincing Federal Reserve Notes?
Or am I just slow on the uptake?
Disregard parent post... I was trying something and never meant to post it.
It's much more high-level, but CNN has an article on this as well.
Remember that story about Open Source hardware awhile ago? Many of the comments said that this would be too expensive because of manufacturing costs. Perhaps this story provides hope that this may eventually be a reality.
Lib.BENCH the only site you'll ever need!
.1mm thick inkjet lines? I'm guessing u can't use a laser printer type thing since you'd melt the plastic.
So how big will our chips be?
And, are we buying a licence to print the processor, does the actual processor belong to us, and are we allowed to print duplicates when the dog eats the 1st one?
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Now we trade music and movies over the net, the next thing will be trading hardware!
Download your own bootleg PS2!
Companies that deal in information, anything that can be represented in 1s and 0s are freaking out because it is so damned easy to trade their precious property on the net (or it will be really soon).
With this sort of technology what's to stop us from trading bootlegged schematics across the net? Hardware manufactures won't be safe anymore.
To project into the future with nanotech ala "The Diamond Age", NOTHING is safe. Why should you bother to buy the PS2-equivilent when you can just download bootlegged specs from Gnutella and have your army of nanos crank it out?
The future will be interesting on so many levels...
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I wear pants.
They are talking about achieving a 25 micron feature size. The current generation of processors is being done with an 0.13 micron feature size, meaning that the number of gates you can fit on your plastic chip is about 40000 (200 times 200) times lower.
Still, if they can get one transistor in 25 microns square, and handle all the wiring in other layers:
* The original 68000 (with 68,000 transistors) fits in a 6.5 by 6.5 mm square.
* The original 80386 (with 275,000 transistors) fits in a 13.1 by 13.1 mm square.
* The original 80486 (1.2M transistors) needs 27.4 by 27.4 mm (just over a square inch). Once we get to this stage a lot of the transistors are L1 cache.
Unfortunately, the definition of "feature size" is not the minimum width or length of a transistor, but instead the smallest dimension that can be reliably fabricated on a chip. On digital ICs, the feature size refers to the minimum gate length. The actual transistor, when factoring in total gate and source/drain diffusion areas, is much larger than the square of the feature size.
To estimate how much area it would take to port a microprocessor to this printing process, the best approximation is to scale the area of the original chip by the ratio of (25 um / (x) um)^2, where (x) is the original feature size. The original 80486 die was 0.414 inches by 0.649 inches with a feature size of 0.8 um. The "printed" 80486 would therefore be 12.94 inches by 20.28 inches! Furthermore, it would be much slower than the "old" 80486 because of the lower mobility and much higher capacitance of the transistors. You would be lucky to clock it at 1 MHz.
Although this printing process would be great for low power embedded applications (e.g. "smart" wallpaper, giant displays, ultra-cheap dumb terminals, throwaway sensors, etc.), you'll never get the kind of high-performance computing you'd expect from a laptop or desktop, or even a Palm PDA for that matter. Performance-wise, this process will never compete with traditional silicon and submicron lithography, although it will find some useful and profitable applications.
might dwarf the performance of single-layer silicon
Until it went up in a big poof of smoke from the heat... How do you cool a 3d IC, made out of paper (not a good heat conductor) no less?
Don't they make iron-on transfers for printers nowadays? Let's combine the two technologies and create ready-to-wear computers!
Where the wind blows, the tumbleweed goes.
It would come in handy right about now to print me out a boot blocker so I could watch DTV. The plans for building one is on the net, but i can't fab a PCB so i'm going to have to buy one off some company that did fab them. The thing that kills me is there are about $20 worth of components on these things that sell for $100.
I could be printing up a whole bunch for everyone i know.. sweeeeeeeeet.
And now, the truly 1337 can overclock before the fab!
This is a self-referential sig
Why not get semiconductor tatoo ink?
Is this a joke? Cause I'm left here thinking man thats what everyone was saying when I first got into computing. No one will ever have one of these in their home they are to big/expensive. I don't know about any of the other self proclaimed geeks out there but I can't wait to get my hands on something like this. It may be just out of my reach right now but I'm sure I won't have to wait more than a couple of years before I will be able to purchase one. Soon we could have true open source computing everything from your Motherboard to your software could be open sourced. It makes me all gitty thinking about it.
That's funny. your user info page says "Please donate your used, reliable PCs and Macs to independent journalists here". We should stop that, because it "will destroy the need for a computer hardware insdustry in certain sectors."
Also, this designs could be open-sourced.. That would be nice.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
Wouldn't this lead to the ultimate overclockable machine? If you can replace the parts every day, every hour, every minute, or heck, just have the thing constantly regenerate itself, you could run WAY over spec and not care.
That might be expensive, but if that wasn't a concern....
sig fault
It's nice to see that 3D printing is in the news again. Last I heard was a group who had made various electronic components from ceramic. This is definately a trend a lot of us hardware engineers and general geeks may want to look at. Although there are the definate limitations of material and how practical cost will be for something that can print at such a low level I'm sure that this could be very viable within 20 years.
.--bagel--.---------------.
| aim: | bagel is back |
| icq: | 158450 |
( o ) one could say I'm rather baked
To keep killing trees. Way to go!
I would guess that this would have all kinds of support from the prp-Open Source side of the world. Printing up your own usually implies the ability, no matter the difficulty, to modify and individualize, which is what open source is all about, right?
Does such a thing exist yet? Just imagine a completely free computer, from hardware to software. Sure, it might cost the price of a piece of circuit paper or whatever it will be called and the circuit ink. If the prices of such materials ever approached that of regular deskjet-like ink and paper... we would live in a perfect techie world of free hardware and software, through and through. Costing pennies on the dollar to make another copy.
A printed CPU with a printed flatscreen display, printed speakers, keyboard, pointer device, and a nice install of GNU/Linux. All downloaded from the web. All GPL'ed.
Not printable batteries, printable solar cells would make energy free too by converting abundant solar energy to electricity.
Uhhh... actually, I would have my walls simulate an environment: Playboy Mansion.
true... true dat
Problem with printing circuits on paper is that they will generate alot of heat and cooling the bitch will be hard. Water cooling a paper board and now your left with a soggy board. People will be having fires in the computers everywhere!
Ahem.
VAPOR!
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I think that this technolgy would be nice. But, I don't think that the quallity and the practical power of the printed circits would be what the user really wants. Power and performance wise.
However, this might be a great product for the do-it-yourself electronics guru. I would have a hay-day printing out my own circits and testing them. My hands are too shaky at times and soldering can be difficult. Most notably before the daily intake of caffeine. Trying to get those surface mount electronics on the board, man, those are hard to do!
actually no, they couldn't do that. Cease functioning maybe. Explode and damage other property, we call that a BOMB.
Yeah instead of downloading the piece of hardware you wanted, you get a robot intent on beating the living crap out of you!
"Hey wait a minute, I didn't download the newest heavyweight Battle Bot model. YAARAARRRRRRggggGGGGG!"
-Tyler
Happy people make bad consumers.
HA! Do that and the crackhead will slap you with a cease-and-desist letter faster than you can say "foo"!!
Sean
HA! Do that and the crackhead will slap you with a cease-and-desist letter faster than you can say "foo"!!
Sean
I submitted this story a few months ago when it was covered in MIT's Technology Review.
I even quoted the article's predictions of "open-source hardware" in my post, but it must have been preempted by a Jon Katz movie review or another article about Napster or something.
Er, you do know that these already exist, don't you? I have one I bought back in 1994, and it's the same height, width, and (really) thickness as my credit card; I think it cost me about $20. I kept it in my wallet for a long time, but I guess being sat on on several times a say proved too much, 'cause it don't work no more...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
The notion of being able to maufacture chips on the desktop combined with P2P file-sharing gives a whole new slant to "Open Hardware".
..." but it gets really exciting when the technology develops to make these fabbers as commonplace as scanners.
N ap ster.sht
The article says that "scientists will be able to
The key is creating generalised fabricators that are able to manufacture many products - just as the computer is a generalised logic machine.
Check out:
http://www.ennex.com/publish/200102-MB&Howison-
don't tell your friends - tell your friendly VCs.
Cheers
James
Ahem.
In a story posted by CmdrTaco regarding open source chipsets/cpus (try this), i said:
the notion of open source hardware coupled with conductive polymer technology could have big implications. You could download a chipset blueprint and print it using plastics. Of course, this won't be suitable for the microprocessor market, but it will definitely be big in things like small personal display units and other electronics like cell phones.
I remember seeing a blurb on the news about the development of paper cell phones, prepaid, that you can just throw away. The inventor says one day she was calling someone on a cell phone and wanted to throw it out the window, and so she thought "hey, disposable cell phones!" The relevence here is that it contains no actual chips, only a three-layer peice of paper. I could only find a few stories about in, most notably this.
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#nohup cat
I have a friend that works at E-Ink and from what I have heard they are going through some big shake ups with their technology. Seems that they are close to mass production, but there are some idea problems with the top brass, so they are cutting back for a while and getting ready to shift to this new tech. On the other hand MIT is working on a competive technology using polimers to get a slightly photoluminesent color flexiable display. From what another one of my friends working on this project says the creation of these displays will be fast and cheep. Just take whateve it is that you want to be the display and dip it into 3 vats. When it comes out you have a display. Gotta love progress.
Fear the power of NTie!
Imagine CAD programs teaching students to assemble processors, even multiple processor configurations.
The article says that transistors have already been created. Well from transistors, you can create receivers, transmitters, oscillators, flip-flop circuits, etc etc etc...
I can imagine uses for school classrooms, or even budding hardware hackers who now use those home kits you can get at radio shack and other places (I myself built a heathkit radio as a teenager).
Don't like the computer chip GM installed into your car? Well, make one yourself! How about a better microcontroller to monitor your power usage in your house? The possibilities and opportunities of development will skyrocket as people will be able to move development from dedicated labs to the privacy of their homes.
On the dark side, I can imagine all kinds of signal processing devices like cable TV decoders (yes, it's a "victimless" crime, but still illegal), encryption devices (for illegal purposes) and weapons control systems.
The printing press, when first developed, opened up fantastic opportunities, but also made it easier to steal intellectual property and disseminate false information. We have to use this new tool wisely...
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When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
750kHz exactly :)
Capacitor leakage might be a problem, but it's not impossible to translate those old designs into static CMOS. And the patents have expired!
Well, i dont think the patents are the problem. I guess today it is possible to build a more efficient CPU with the same amount of transistors without having to rely on i4004 patents.
While I think this is a very interesting technique I totally dislike the hype coming with it. Maybe it is actually possible to manufacture cheap electronics with a cheap printerlike machine in a few decades, but this will be limited to slow low complexity circuits, like electronic price signs etc.
And even IF it will be possible to manufacture higher end electronics this way - it will most probably always be cheaper to do it industrial. Just compare it to books. Today everyone is capable of printing his own books with his very own printer - but how many people are actually doing it ? It is much more convenient to buy books.
The i4004 was manufactured in a 10micrometer process. So one could maybe do a i4004 clone with just 2.5^2=6.25 times the size of a real i4004. :)
Ok, probably it would not work due to capacitor leakage (it used dynamic registers) and if it worked it could just be clocked at xx kHz ..
Years ago I implemented the rule described in the book, and a cell editor that I used to make a few circuits. Here's a circuit for a 2-d cellular automata rule that supports passing signals along wires and performing logical operations, with cross over, fan out, conjunction and negation -- all you need! Theoretically you could program anything -- but timing is everything.
http://catalog.com/hopkins/art/circuit.gif
The top left is an "or" gate, with a couple of looped inputs that endlessly repeat the same values, and a graphical "ground" that the output flows out of (not connected to anything). To its right is an xor gate, and after that are a couple loops and delay lines. Below those is a half adder, and a criss-crossing fan out that duplicates the pair of signals a couple of times. Below that are a couple of half adders composed together to make an adder with carry. Next to last is a part of a circuit that I can't remember what it does, and under that is a pulse widener, that duplicates a signal, delays it, and ors it back into itself to make it into a longer train of bits.
It was really fun making these, since the simulator and the graphics editor were running at the same time, so it was like soldering live logic, with signals flowing through it in real time!
I've lost track of the original Forth source code for the rule, which is based on a Margolis neighborhood using a lookup table, but it's described in the book.
More stuff on cellular automata:
http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/art/cell.html
Of course the granddaddy of cellular automata is John von Neumann himself, who designed a complex self reproducing cellular automata "universal constructor" on graph paper before it was ever practical to simulate them. It's reproduced in some historical ACM monographs on computer science.
Here's an actual implementation of John von Neumann's universal constructor, which is absolutely amazing to watch going about its business of reproducing itself:
http://alife.santafe.edu/alife/software/jvn.html
The paper computers would be great for implementing cellular automata, that you could draw on with a pencil while they ran in ferrociously real time!
-Don
Take a look and feel free: http://www.PieMenu.com
Bragging rights pretty soon won't be how many fps you can get in Quake III, but how many circuits you can print out per square inch. Which I suppose would lead to fps anyhow..shoot. Like fat bastard says, "It's a vicious cycle".
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GeekWares - Buy and Download Today!
Somebody with some electrical engineering experience should start laying down an open source framework for being able to print these transistors.
Maybe a spice interface or something like that? Get in touch with the engineers working on this! It would be great if Linux was the development platform for this tech...
Printable batteries, printable video displays, and now printable chips. This could easily change our media in the near future. Do I see the next version of Hallmark cards on the horizon?
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I can just hear your neighbors: "Oh my God, he killed Kenny!"
Planning to be moderated ± 1: Bad Pun.
I think the inkjet stuff may be more useful in terms of producing printed PCBs and wiring with simple logic, leaving most of the power and computation to standard ICs and such.
So this kind of stuff wouldn't be useless either.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
It means you can choose not to have a 'gay' color on your iMac, just download and print in your fav color, to match your favorite color scheme.
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
But luckily, even were it to work quite like that, with systems that rivalled traditional circuitry, I think there'd be a few years before the courts good too tied up.
You could always photocopy your computer in case you overclocked it too much and it got fried :)
--- I used to moderate, then I read the -1 articles and decided having to filter through them was not worth it.
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"This server is powered by GNU/Linux on a GNU/Paper cluster..." :-)
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
What a script kiddie could do to really bug someone would be to print *rotting* fish... OR BILL GATES!!!!! ("Yeah, I installed a firewall after a script kiddy broke into my Linux box and printed out a hundred copies of Bill Gates.")
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
SUWAIN: Slashdot User Without An Interesting Name
Leknor
When I read the headline I thought: teletype? Aren't we past that? Or are we now entering an AfterY2K world... :(
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--hongpong.com
After all, you can theoretically make your own computer even today using off-the-shelf chips. The problem is, it would be the size of a room because you don't have a fab!
"Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental." -Slashdot
I could see this as extremely useful for space exploration. Not unmanned, mind you, but the manned missions. In the 70's we nearly lost Apollo 13 when components malfunctioned. There was no rescue possible. Basically, they used the LEM as a lifeboat and boosted back to earth with it. One of the major challenges was constantly failing equipment with no spares on hand. Now if we could use 3D printers combined with printable circutry, the crew could create replacement parts in space, in the craft. These parts may not function as well as the original, but in an emergency they just might do the trick. As for things such as power supplies, thank goodness we don't need to run these things on the archaic batteries they used then. Today I would expect them to have generators and/or solar panels on hand for anything other than a low-orbit vehicle.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I see this as a great opportunity for EE and CE profs to use in the classroom. A student could design a digital circuit, then literally print it out. This, or people in industry could have a quick tool to rapidly prototype a complex digital system.
I'm not sure what the cost of printing this stuff out is though. I suppose that FPGA's for the time being are cheaper in the long run if you're going to be making modifications all of the time. Except that FPGA's can get expensive when you blow em up.
My biggest hope is that using plastic processors wil make computers more recycleable. I could imagine a process in which you send your computer to the recycling center, where they melt it down and separate the plastic from the metal. We can only hope the next generation of computers is a lot more friendly to the environment than our current batch is...
I think the real point of this isn't to be able to download and print the new Pentium VIII 10.5 GHz CPU, but to allow hobbyists to quickly, easily, and cheaply design their own circuits. Sure, we're talking about the same stuff that you can go to Rat Shack and grab some solder and get it done, but it'll be cheaper and easier to print them out. And, if you screw it up, click-click-Save-Print again and again.
I'm a college student currently lodged in student housing, and a machine the size of my bathroom could still fit comfortably on the average desk.
I'm not bitter. I'm not._ ______
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I was reading a while back that plastic semiconductors are making epaper a lot more viable...similar machines used to do this could be what you'd use for creating the actual circuits...
terradot, growing awareness
It might be cheap to print something someone else already designed but it won't be cheap to design these systems and that is why it won't be freely downloadable. Why would anyone spend tons of money designing something that others will want to take and use for really cheap or free?
I can foresee a day when people will warez their CPU and their motherboard (not to mention 3d accelerator, soundcard and ethernet card!).
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
That comment alone made enduring all the other Beowulf cluster jokes worth it.
These here young fellas in Madison, as I call them all to often, have successfully created tiny little crystal-like slates that, when acted upon by a light wave, act the same as cones being acted upon by magnets. Sequencing many of these little plates can produce the same level of sound and quality as a traditional sound system, and that was the biggest "it'll never be an all light system" hurdle, in my opinion (which is never humble).
The first photo-processor was made in 1998, by either Lucent or Agilent. It used the same theories as electronic processors, read: yes and no, 1 and 0; however, the first 8bit processor was made by another company.
I'll email you links to several relating articles once I feel the need to go forth and scour these things up. Web scouring is a weekend activity for me. Slashdotting is weekday-there's-no-one-at-the-scifi-chatrooms activity.
I may even sent the list into slashdot and query as to the general populous' thoughts into the future of photo-computing.
The New DSL will probably be the only thing using electricity in the future. You see, charged phophorus plates intermittenly lock some 800' of optical cable carrying 8bit signals; ultimately, the setup is capable of reaching many, many miles without any signal degradation
All this will become very obvious to even the casual techno-user within three years.
Trolls know these things, just watch and see.
Now, this doesn't mean "printing" future hardware, for testing or otherwise, won't happen, but I wouldn't wait for the expensive electrical things, when you may be going to the store to pick up very fine threads of optical fiber.
*raises glass* Here's to the hopes of open source designs in the age of photons.
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
Actually, I think there upset because they're Amiga users.
Well, to the two young men, and the older alpha-geek-wanna-be, I'm happy to inform you that your destinies are to follow me into creating Dotslash!
.oO(I didn't find it laugh out loud funny, but I've been told by several that it atleast puts a smile on their face. I agree with them. The best part is the "Last Beowulf cluster dies in captivity")
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
In US currency, there are tight controls on the paper and the ink, and there are finer lines than you can duplicate with even a 1200 dot per inch printer. If you check the bill under a microscope and closely examine the paper, anything that gets past you wasn't counterfeited with new technology, but rather by someone as skilled at the centuries old engraving-on-metal technology as the US Mint's engravers -- and with access somehow to paper that is legally sold only to the Mint. But since most cashiers hardly look at the bills, a lot of lousy color-copier counterfeits do get passed. So the Mint has changed the design of the larger bills.
And among teenagers, status will be determined by whose logo is scrolling across the forehead... Oh god, this might actually work. Quick someone, delete this whole discussion before some corporate drone happens to see it! 8-)
I think the 4004 was clocked in KHz. That's often fast enough to control a machine that takes seconds to do anything. Capacitor leakage might be a problem, but it's not impossible to translate those old designs into static CMOS. And the patents have expired! Once they get decent plastic transistors (not a problem that's been solved to my knowledge, but it will be), the real problem as far as doing a low performance microcontroller in plastic isn't space or speed, it's cost. Tying up an expensive printer for hours to make one CPU, vs etching 10,000 at a time into silicon -- maybe it will eventually make economic sense, but I doubt it.
OK, so just now the resolution is poor. If you consider a good ink jet printer can manage approx 1200 dots per inch, that gives a line width of about 0.8 thou = 20um (more or less confirmed by the article). But even so, you don't need to fully catch up with the current state of the art in conventional silicon processing to start building some awesome things on large plastic sheets. They would have to be fault tolerant structures, but can you imagine a neural network printed out on an A4 sheet? Soon we could have truly intelligent books!
Robert
Nemo me impune lacessit
Ive heard that there are only 10 people in the world who master the metal-engraving technique to make the masters for printing currency.
Supposedly, these people can engrave 200+ lines in the space of an inch.
It won't melt... it's made of paper remember: it will BURN!! "Yeah, I was trying to overclock my new CPU to 6.5GHz, and the damn thing overheated, caught fire, and burnt my mother board, my video card, my hard drive and my screen to ash... Yeah I'm printing another box now."
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
www..--..net - for incisive, w
Regarding the metal connectors, there are already various polymers that will conduct electricity. Presumably some variant could be found that could be sprayed on like ink to form the conducting paths. But on a related note... how would you plug your paper CPU into your paper motherboard?
There's no $$$ in 'team'...
www..--..net - for incisive, w
This system does work fine for fairly complex circuitry, but I do not see how this technology, in its current state, or even within the next few years, could be suited for manufacturing anything with the complexity and operating conditions of a processor that is the equivalent of those in modern consumer desktops. The first problem is simply the scale of precision and cleaness required. Your average CPU uses a < 0.20 micron resolution (that's 200 nanometres, recent CPU's use as small as 130nm) manufacturing process that is only possible with very, very expensive specialised equipment following a time-consuming process under extremely clean conditions where dust cannot exist at all. Also, a large number of 3-dimensional structures will simply not be printable, and there is a very possible limitation of materials (it's not all just silicon...). Another issue is the working environment, which will have to be extremely clean as before, and areas of the processor approach very high temperatures which would undoubtably heavily damage the plastic. So, it looks like illegally downloading CPU's or any other complex electronics over the Internet won't be a common practice for a few decades to come.
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This is gonna make one helluva under $1000 dollar PC!
I wonder how the DMCA will be applied to somthing like this.
this would probably just become vaporware since it will be so hard to control the distrobution, no one would make any money on it.
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-The American people have overpaid; I am here to ask for a refund.
I would imagine it would be cheaper to buy a piece of hardware than reverse-engineer it, convert it to a format suitable for the plastic chips, and produce it. Most hardware would still be released in premade forms. After all, it's not as if this is a *copier.*
sgi? gis? gsi? sig.
Cool! Where do I order my .18 Micron printer from?
... you're a dirty redneck whose armpits are the home to a festering flea colony. Why don't you just go kill yourself, loser?
All your penis are belong to us!!
This should have been one of the perils in the prior article on over-clocking.
:)
Not only do you risk ruining your CPU, but now if you overclock your video card, you could melt your CPU!
wonder what it'll do for recycling - hitech and lotech plastic recyclables.
I've been printing computers and then building them during class for the last few weeks. I get them from the Paper Mac page, and print them out with my laser printer. Then I take them to class and, while the teacher is babbling dumb stuff about what she has done with computers, I build macs. I've got a small army of them collecting here...
Posted from the wireless couch.
The original 80386 (with 275,000 transistors) fits in a 13.1 by 13.1 mm square.
It turns out that it's much worse than this. The minimum feature size gives you the minimum gate width you can use (if you're lucky). A transistor, contacts and all, takes up easily ten times this in both directions (after spacing rules and so forth have been taken into account).
Speed is also inversely proportional to the square of the feature size. Going from 0.25 micron to 25 micron slows you down by a factor of about 10,000 (give or take). You'll end up with microchip wallpaper that runs at 50 kHz.
There are uses for this (big active displays comes to mind), but computers aren't one of them.
I have a name to suggest for this: Breadboards!
Neat, huh?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
Picture people jumping out of windows of call centers. "What kind of graphics card do you have?" "Uh.. well, it's a Voodoo 5 base design, but my friend added another texture unit, and then we kinda played with the blending mode logic..."
Now there's a strange thought.. presumably, condoms would be a workable substrate for circuits.
"Um... no... that's not a webcam printed on my condom, or something.."
Just because you can doesn't mean you should.
There could be a licensing agreement, but how do you track pirated hardware?
There seems to be a new trend to have software contact a company's servers to see if it's been pirated or not. Hardware could do the same, and if it's pirated it could explode and leave an inky mess all over just like the capsules banks put in with stolen money.
Sure, I'll pick it up from my parents house tonight and post the author. There is a small chance that I misremembered the name and it's 'A' for Anything, but I was pretty sure I remember it as being an odd title because it didn't match up.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Good question. I don't think the book ever addressed the point of Land ownership at all...
And it didn't really occure to me until you mentioned it that Land really should be the most valuable item in a society like that... I think I'll reread the book tommorow and see if they mentioned it while I wasn't paying attention.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
Surely, if you're "printing" a chip, even of today's standards of size, you're still looking at the printer moving the substrate along minute amounts to get the design right. It would probably take several days...
The article says we can expect roughly 1/100 the speed of current silicon. I guess that means CPU's with 500khz - 1Mhz clock speed. The kind of machines that started the PC era.
At the same time, we're seeing a strong attack on the programmable, user-controlled computer by the Intellectual Property cartel. Maybe we'll end up using CP/M on 1979-vintage machines because the current crop of hardware is too locked-down and tamperproof. A machine like that could be open-sourced and downloaded from the internet.
On the flip side, I see many possibilities for abuse. Manufacturers could build flat computers into cereal boxes, shipping labels, even software packaging. Lots of places to monitor, advertise, and present license agreements. Lots of stuff that quietly 'phones home'.
Is it good or bad on the balance? Doesn't matter - nobody can roll back technology.
For some reason when you said Trojan hardware I imagined a condom with "chips" printed onto them. Oh the possibilities there.
Yeah, then we would have to put up with script kiddies writing VBScripts that add unwanted anchovies to those aforementioned pizzas.
What about the metal interconnect? Aluminum or copper... or not metal at all? What about metal layers and via's? What kind of package will this "die" go into?
I'm curious as to how they plan to address these issues
Or maybe the Gimp could have a plugin for printed circuits
...now Apple will be able to simply print out gay-ass color-coordinated Bondi Blue motherboards to stick in their iMacs. Wonderful.
Sean
I haven't read it in years, but I seem to remember in Clarke's "The City and the Stars" a passage regarding the village "foundry". Every village had some sort of self-contained "millworks" about the size of a refrigerator that produced "useful devices" (my quotes). Can my recollection be any more vague? Anyone have a copy on hand to refer to?
Come to think of it, this moves computer technolgy, such as creating machines to do "x, y, or z" into a freedom of the press realm.
The petty little potentates pop paranoia and profiteering must be trembling in hooror at this, once they figure it out and see it coming down the road.
This could be fun!
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Thinking out loud here... If a CPU or board design can be expressed in a printer markup language under this scheme, then I believe it would be possible to translate that description into plain english. Or a suitably different reverse-engineered piece of hardware could be described this way. It could be expressed out loud on street corners in songs or poetry or t-shirts. (Just like what happened with DeCSS.) Only free speech would be used to distribute hardware. Great for spreading not only the word but the means of useful hardware to the masses.
Now, granted, these would be pretty screwed up songs. And pretty long! And I guess haiku is out of the question. But in theory, this could lead to free-speech-like implications that the hardware industry may not have had to deal with yet.
Sing me a song, you're the VLSI man...
It's seems very unlikely that we would have a future where every single home user would download the new AMD Athlon K399 1 Billion MHz, although I must say that the idea of me going to my computer resaler, and having _them_ print a copy (no more "out of stock" replies") would be really cool.
Hey, it was just a dream. Not everything always makes perfect sense in a dream.
But good idea. Ooops... bad idea. We don't want this to actually happen.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
I can't wait to have a 10x8 foot monitor! I'll scare the heck out of my neighbors with life-size Q3A!
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
It'll raise the level of computer literacy by a notch. Not only will it be divided into the standard 2 groups:
Can program VCR
Cannot program VCR
The Can program VCR group will be divided into
Can read PCB
Cannot read PCB
Joking aside, it wouldn't be difficult to, like a script kiddy, just download blueprints and get yourself a homebrew mp3 player, but how can you 'trust' such kits, implicitly, any more than you can trust software?
Mostly it should be okay, but the odd virus here and there could wreak havoc on someone. So a new class of 'anti-trojan' software, as well as more literacy in computer skills in general, needs to taught.
I would like to have a private fab and rapid prototype lab in my garage. That would be muy nifto.
Louis
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
Open source, man!
I spend time and effort to develop a car Ogg player and GPS receiver.
I am part of a group of people who have similar interests, so we all share our variations on the designs, LCD or display implementations, voice activated, IR, bluetooth, etc.
Over a period of months or years, we all have in car dash Ogg players, GPS recievers with voice activation and other random stuff.
Other people take this and adapt it to Visor handspring modules
They add power saving and cycling functions, or something. Or they make it smaller.
Feedback occurs, and the indash unit becomes smaller. We get enough space to add more features.
Back and forth.
Isn't this how the Open Source model works?
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"The fab jammed again..."
"Is there a jam?"
"...it says it's out of toner?"
Will the real Bruce Perens Please Stand Up
But if the printer could do a 3-d chip, and you could adequately cool such a chip, then a pentium class chip is possible.
Anyways, it might be possible to do a mini-cluster of cpus to give the same power. If "printing" hardware becomes cheap, I'm guessing the computer designs will adapt. Maybe, instead of a localized cpu/memory/etc, the components would be integrated. Imagine a "motherboard" with each square inch of it being its own cpu/memory. There would be no seperate vid/sound/modem cards, just the appropriate connects on the edge of the board. Rather spiffy.
The biggest use of these is likely to be in units that have to travel to places where getting replacement hardware is difficult. Such as extraterrestrial expeditions, or armies at war on earth. Combine this technology with a fabber and you can build whatever replacements you like when things break.
The far ahead possibilities include virally spreading across the universe using fabbers that build more fabbers...
I wonder if E-Paper could be adapted to form circuit boards.. Download the chip, plug it into your e-paper, watch it assemble itself. I bet it could be done.
Douglas Adams
1952-2001 :(
The headlines:
2010 eGates hardware over throws governments
2012 eGates hardwar controls 90% of the internet
2013 TuxBoard Manufacturing, ESR CEO started in conjunction with the GNU Project has begun. The EG Supercomputerweb laughs.
2013 People sick of having their homes burn down try TuxBoard Manufacturing out of curiosity and hope
2014 EG SCW now scared. FUD attacks: TuxBoards don't burn down, they must not be capable of the high-level processing.
2015 Cox on a Chip capable of making eGates hardware work without burn out and without the need for Windows 9000 XPIJFLSFN
2016 Helsinki almost nuked, but bombs fail to go off, and land 300mi out of range...hardware failure.
2018 Redmond uprising attempts to overthrow EG SCW
2020 After the 100 GHZ war, Linus Torvalds reigns as occaissionally benevolent emperor over 98% of the world.
2021 New Zealand finally ready to cater to AmigaSketch users.
2024 Massive solar flare damages most of the computer world.
2025 Etchasketch becomes popular
2026 Printable punch cards arrive on the outskirts of the remaining ecivilization.
2027 Last Beowulf cluster dies in captivity.
2028 Torvalds frozen and displayed for all to look at.
3028 Cockroaches and lawyers wonder why there is a frozen person on the European continent. Lawyers wonder if he has money (which looks a lot like punch cards)
3030 The Troll Niscenus and a band of AnonCows re-establish world order with a central hub of infromation they call DotSlash.
So, who's up for volleyball?
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I can only assume we'll need Cox on a Chip to write the drivers for the new e-paper.
I don't think we'll see printers sketching 8-atom wide paths on unborn microchips, ever.
A) The "printer" would cost way to much for any common use.
B) Have you seen the size of the machines that currently do this? They're ENIAC, hyperbolicly speaking.
C) By the time anyone gets this going, computer will be communicating on their boards and processors with 8bit light streams rather than electonic anything...err, not that I know anything. If Century Tel didn't buy GTE from Verizon, you wouldn't not know anything either.
I usually get turned into a troll everytime I say this, but, "Who's up for volleyball!?"
"Yeah...it was the numbers that were irrational, not the murderous cult of vegetarians...." -- Hippasus of Metapontum
I hate to spoil all this dreaming with realism, but you'd really be pushing this technology to make even an 8-bit CPU. (See the third page of the article.) The smallest elements you can print are about 25 micrometers (.001 inch), which is over 100 times the linear dimensions in a modern Pentium chip. And that means the transistors will be 10,000 times the area, and 10,000 times the capacitance. Add the inferior performance of the plastic transistors to the complexity limitation implied by the dimensions, and what you wind up with is something like a 6502, but running at a few KHz...
There are actually many control applications where a small 8-bitter running at KHz speeds is quite sufficient. But you can buy good 8-bit silicon CPU's for $0.50 to $15 (depending mainly on how many pins you need), and I don't see any chance of these plastic circuits beating those prices.
What this might be good for is the custom interface circuits that are virtually always needed between the CPU and the world. These usually wind up either as a large number of generic components, soldered onto a fair-sized circuit board, costing perhaps $20 to $100 to utilize a $5 CPU. Or you can use a few programmable logic device chips -- but these cost more than the CPU. So if they can get reasonable price/performance, you might eventually see printed plastic circuits containing the "glue logic" as well as the resistors, capacitors, and ESD-suppressing diodes -- so you just solder on the CPU chip and its ready to go. (But not for a Pentium motherboard -- think about the speed.)
More realistically, there are many applications where large, low-performance circuits would be ideal. Displays, for instance -- you can etch a wonderful display into a silicon chip, but you need a microscope or a good projection system to read it. Maybe they will soon be able to print the same circuit in plastic at readable size.
This wouldn't be suitable for most computing applications, where designing software for a generalized processor would be easier and more effective most of the time.
But for dedicated and experimental electronics, it'd be golden. Just think how much this would accelerate prototyping and design for BEAM robots, since you don't have to mess around with soldering bunches of components!
cryptochrome---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?
Technology Review had an article about the very same topic months ago. Surprised it didn't hit slashdot then. Well anyway, it is an interesting read as well for anyone who want to hear more.
This reminds me of a book called "'A' For Everything" where an inventor created a duplicating device. You put the object you want duplicated on one side, and press a button, and a copy comes out on the other side. Within hours almost everyone had one. Within days the economy had reverted to Slaves being the only valuable form of property. From there people figured out how to clone other people using the device and a bizarre slave/owner hierarchy was born. A very interesting book, I recommend it to everyone.
Kintanon
Check out JoshJitsu.info for Brazilian Ji
However, I doubt we'll see any sort of IC fabs capable of producing anything as complicated as say, a 555, on the desktop within the next 50 years. Call me skeptical.
Electronics buffs, we build stuff that we download, design, read in books, etc. Automation would be getting access to a plotter or a UV rig for making PCB construction much, much easier.
-bugg
Check it out here!
Its true the density isn't as great, but in this case the medium is just a piece of plastic, not a VERY expensive piece of silicon, so real estate is not a commodity... however it sounds like their switching times are much slower then silicon transistors ... given that and the distance between the resistors growing (because they're less dense) it sounds like the problem will infact be speed.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
I had a dream some months ago.
Printable PDA's were developed. You could have them printed on the surface of your skin. No more need to wear a wristwatch, you would just print a PDA on your wrist.
Problem was (in the dream) that they would wear off, and you would have to have them reprinted (Or have a newer better model printed) onto your wrist.
They became so common that everyone had to have on in order to just carry on daily life, business transactions, etc.
Poor people couldn't afford $40/mo to print these things on their wrists.
So good ol' corporate greed stepped in to help. You could get a sponsored low-end PDA printed onto your right hand by agreeing to also have a color animated advertising banner printed across your forehead. Next month, come back, pay homage to corporate greed. Repeat.
Don't laugh. I really did dream this. (I said, no laughing.)
Those who can, do. Those who can't, use Windows.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Now that's the real trick, isn't it? In modern integrated circuit design the interconnect uses up more area than the transistors. Even if you could do all the wiring in other layers (by the way, only VERY recently have ICs come out with lots of layers. One or two wiring layers was the standard for YEARS) you would still need lots of vias to move the signals between layers and down to the transistors.
And as for cost, I just checked MOSIS and if you needed a 6.5mm by 6.5mm square silicon chip fabbed, MOSIS would charge you about $70000 for a lot of 25! Kind of pricey for a 68k processor, don't you think?
There are a lot of reasons silicon is useful, and I'd be VERY suprised if people started printing chips out on their desks.
downloadable and printable hardware, if it develops to fruition, will destroy the need for a computer hardware insdustry in certain sectors.
the gamers, the kids, everyone who uses their computers as a hot rod and doesn't have mission critical stuff running on them, will pirate hardware.
There could be a licensing agreement, but how do you track pirated hardware? use it on the Net and it sends out a call signal? I don't think so. Even if it could be traced, people would just set up parallel intranet networks with the stuff instead of using it on the Internet, where cops, et al could track it.
All in all, opening the doors to terrorists, foreign intelligence agencies, and anybody else who wants to reliably gather information without much expenditure and without being traced.
Goat sex free since 2001
It seems like once they have perfected this tech, a natural extension would be to repeatedly overprint with layers of conductive, nonconductive, and semiconductor ink to create a 3-D circuit. This could go a long way toward offsetting the registration size and natural slowness of the junctions, since you could stack them into a cube. If the layer size is comparable to the junction size, you could end up with breathtaking densities. With good massively parallel architecture such blocks -- they wouldn't be flexible and would probably be more like regular IC's once manufabbed -- might dwarf the performance of single-layer silicon.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
Don't underestimate the importance of this.
I predict one of the earliest practical application will be a real credit-card calculator -- one the same size and thickness as your credit cards. Feature size will probably go down at about the same rate it has for silicon. Remember, back in the 70's feature size on silicon wasn't much better than what these guys are aiming for. And neither was the speed -- remember 4000 series CMOS? Yet these chips were the backbone of all technology when they were expensive.
This was a good article, well balanced and without a lot of the usual hype about how the tech will result in self-assembling skyscrapers. These people have modest, achievable goals. It will be interesting to see what they do.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]
This will bring a whole new definition to the word "warez"
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"Against stupidity the very god themselves contend in vain" -Johann Schiller
Cripes, I'm old.
It must be 20 years ago now that Carver Mead was talking about having a machine on your desk that would fabricate silicon integrated circuits for you.
Anyone who's seen a fab line knows it's not that simple. The closest anyone came was e-beam lithography, but those machines are still the size of your bathroom, and still only do some of the processes.
It's pretty interesting to think about printing chip layers like a multi-pass color laser printer.
But can you imagine the toner-cartridge spam you'll get when there are ten kinds of toner material needed, and some run ten bucks a pass?
--Blair
"Dammit! I left my TiVo folded up in my pocket and it went through the wash again..."
One of the critical problems for long distance space endevours is what to do when/if you need to replace hardware in your systems when you're far far away from any fab plant. This kind of technology will go a long way to making the problem moot.
Demonstrant's Open Source Tools
This article has a few more facts about this technology, and its references are from journals like "Science" and "Applied Physics Letters" and "Chemical Review," so you can do some in-depth research if you wish. It's not so complicated that the layman could not read it, and it has some information not covered in the howstuffworks.com article. I did like some of the pictures in the howstuffworks.com article.
The electron mobility in polymers is MUCH lower than Si (a slow semiconductor), a fact that is mentioned in the article, but glossed over on this page. Overclocking these guys still won't get you very far.
One thing not mentioned is the short shelf life of these things. They tend to degrade in days to weeks, depending on the material.
I could go on, but I won't. I'm just glad to see this finally out in the popular media.
They are talking about achieving a 25 micron feature size. The current generation of processors is being done with an 0.13 micron feature size, meaning that the number of gates you can fit on your plastic chip is about 40000 (200 times 200) times lower.
Still, if they can get one transistor in 25 microns square, and handle all the wiring in other layers:
Trying to get much bigger than this (do the P5 in two inches square) is likely to be a loser because getting the signals across these large chips is going to be slow unless you use enough power to melt the plastic.
Memory: if you can do one bit in 25 by 25 microns, a square inch (2.54 cm on a side) gives just over one megabit (bits, not bytes). You're probably not going to be running Gnome or KDE on this.
... until they figure out a way to download and print a Pizza.
... hmmm
"Hello, Domino's? Can you e-mail me a large pizza with mushrooms and extra cheese?"
But then, that might bring a whole new meaning to "Spam Mail"
I wonder if they realize they are only going to sell a handful of these things... The first guy to get one of these printers is just going to print up more printers for his friends...
Trojan hardware.
In the future... motherboards may be nothing more than layers of nonconducting materials with thin conductors connecting various chips and sockets (into which other boards can be connected). Imagine the possibilities!
The same way that literacy, pencils, pens, ink, paper, and books destroyed the iron grip of the autocracy and nobility of hundreds of years ago, printable computers can break the grip of monolithic oligarchies dictating hardware and standards to people who don't need them.
Don't you have any sense of decency, to post such utter garbage in the first place, perdida?
(go ahead mark me as troll or whatever, it really doesn't matter)
Geek dating!
GPL Deconstructed
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A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar