Start the Presses: Printable Circuits Nearly Ready

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."

Comments

Goodbye acid etch, a whole new generation comin

[t0qer]

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.

Cool technology

[hattig]

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...