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Start the Presses: Printable Circuits Nearly Ready

Posted by timothy on from the roll-'em dept.

akookieone writes: "MIT Tech Review has an article on Rolltronics (first appearing in /. a year ago). Seems they can now print circuits 10 micrometers across, and are thinking they could 'very shortly' move from R&D to production."

4 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. WOW by sofar · · Score: 1, Insightful

    This will really give development a big boost, as custom circuitry will be available for lower costs. Imagine developing your own processor and having it printed too!

    oh shoot, it has a paper jam error...

  2. Goodbye acid etch, a whole new generation comin by t0qer · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ahh the things I wont miss,

    burnt hands
    bad odor
    ciruits that just didn't etch correctly.

    I can't recall how many times i've seen a really cool project in popular electronics and being hesitant to build it because its such a pain in the ass etching a board from the magazine or too cheap to order the kit.

    Home printable etching has some very cool implications for the hobbyist or beginner electronics person. Kudo's to the ppl that invented this.

  3. Cool technology by hattig · · Score: 5, Insightful
    This is great for all those applications that don't care about GHz level speeds (or even speeds in the MHz really) or small size transistors. Like TFTs, OLEDs, etc, or low power computing.

    And great for people who want to play with circuits, but don't have a way to fab their own chips. Which is pretty much all of us. We can now go along and make our own Z80 and 6502 derivatives running at a slower speed then the original, but very light and plasticy. Sounds like great fun.

    Probably good for verification of electronic circuits - being slow, you can monitor things very easily. Being large you can see the circuit and attach probes easily. Being cheap you can do this in a small business should this technology make it into cheap units (cheap being in the 10's of thousands of pounds printing onto 3" wide rolls of plastic). Maybe in a few years anyway.

    I wonder if they will ever get the printing down to the micron level, or below, given time? Would be hard I imagine, but imagine a 50MHz stamp... what the purpose would be I don't know, but where theres a technology, theres a product...

  4. Actually, this could really HURT hobby electronics by RatOmeter · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Assuming this technology catches on (and really works), it would be a great boon to the consumer electronics industry.

    At least initially (the first coupla decades?), however, it could cause real harm to the hobby and small run electronic apps. Imagine if all major electronic goods are "printed" at a fab, much like today's chip foundries. The economy of mass production should drive the prices of such goods way down, and that's good. Now imagine that you've got this cool idea for a little 'tronic widget that might be of interest only to yourself and a few geek fellows. You just want to make 25 or 50, even 100 of them.

    Your first obstacle is that the components needed just to build your prototype now cost about 2 to 10 times more than they used to (because discrete transistors, LED's capacitors and such are no longer mass produced). If you do get you prototype built and debugged, how can you afford to build (and who can afford to buy) your small lot of 50? It might be kinda like me trying to get UMC in Taiwan to fab me an ASIC to implement my hobby color organ or some such; they'll do it, if I can pay the 10K or 20K setup and tooling fee's and am willing to pay 2500 USD per chip.

    Maybe some day, the ubertechie might be able to buy their own PC printer, but I see the possibility that hobby electronics and small projects would suffer in the meantime.

    Almost forgot, this technology would also bring "no user servicable parts inside" to a whole new level!