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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."
Hm. I guess it is. But doesn't it have that sheen of, "Why the heck wasn't somebody making these things ten years ago?"
I mean, they have those traces-printed-on-plastic ribbon cables connecting things like keyboards and calculator screens to components. And printer heads in inkjets.
Plus, we have alloys which can be deposited on substrates a micron-layer at a time. How tough is it to dope conducting inks with Gallium-Arsenide? (Or whatever).
Why the heck hasn't this technology been around for a decade or more? It doesn't seem so much like an advance as it does a, "They finally got off their asses and assembled the stupid thing."
-Fantastic Lad
You pull up a website, specify an existing (or upload your .cad file) and you get your IC board in a day or two in the mail. Sign me up...
I admit being able to print your own circuits would be pretty cool for the amateur hobbyist, or even the security conscious -- cheap electronic one-time-pads for example. But I guess it'll be out of my price line for a while yet.
I'm wondering how robust these circuits are going to be, i.e. how long are they going to last and how sensitive they have to be handled. Couldn't seem to find this info in the article.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
This sort of technology could have a myriad of uses.
For example:
I can just see how Steve Jobs (who loves form with function) could use this type of technology to get away from the beige box a step further. You could print out the computer on the back of the screen, or into the monitor stand. Then again, he has almost done that with the new iMac's anyway.
PDA's could get alot smaller.
Also, it (presumably) gets away from alot of issues with size of circuits. Traditional intergrated circuits benefit from small size as they have not only use lower voltages and operate faster, but also have a lower likely hood of defects. Each silicon wafer may have a few pinpoint defects, but each one takes out the whole chip. Smaller chips mean a smaller percentage loss rate.
Presumably this technology is resistant to such faults (or it would be pretty useless at the sizes of sheets of newspaper). This could mean very large integrated circuits without the need for circuit boards as such. In other words, shrinking a whole motherboard down to a large integrated circuit.
While the current technology is still at a 10 micron stage, it could still have benefit if applied to the idea of printing a whole computer rather than just printing a CPU and soldering it in.
Also, I would presume that this is first generation technology, and should reduce below 10 microns fairly easily.
Just a thought or two.
Michael
There is no cryptographic solution to the problem where the intended receiver and the attacker are the same entity.
This is nice and all, but it doesnt seem to give a viable path to high performance circuits.
MIT's semiconducting inks and submicron printing technology seemed a lot more interesting, combined with the rapidly upcoming technologies for localized recrystallization of amorphous silicon into large grain poly-silicon this should get us very near to the quality produced with litography (grains can be made larger than the transistors you will be using, so for all extents and purposes its just as good as crystalline silicon). Unfortunately its gone very quiet though, anyone know if they are still making headway?
This sort of thin-film circuitry would be great for palmtop computing -- the reduction in Batman factor alone would be worth it.
I've been praying for something like this to come along since I was in the military, and we had rules about exactly what we could have on underneath our BDU tunics. Didn't stop most of us military geeks from carrying the cell, Palm, Leatherman, and pager, but it would still be nice to have something that doesn't ruin your uniform appearance (or the lines of your suit, if you're stuck in one of those jobs).
Plus, the flexibility might make a great selling point. Are touch screens flexible?
They that would sacrifice their
This IMHO will be the beginning of a new golden age of hardware hacking. The last time things were somewhat like this was the age of TTL chips in "home" computers in the early to mid 80s. It was much easier to build your own peripherals, joysticks, speech synthesisers (anyone remember the 8-bit SPO256 AL2 chip sold at Radio Shack?) Building your own boards were much more common than today. Widespread use of surface mount boards and chips started to make design of your own board difficult for many hobbiests. Now it will be easy to do this again, and hardware hacking is going to take off.
:)
Want a new interface with your fillinblankhere, download here then print. This type of post will appear frequently on hardware sites. This will give whole new meaning to the term "Warez site"
Just my 2 cents.
burnt hands
bad odor
ciruits that just didn't etch correctly.
You forgot the endless thrills of:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more, Or close the wall up with our American dead!
Well, 50MHz stamps do exist. I own three, and you can do all kinds of nerdy stuff with it, like make an RGB LED harddrive light or a maze-navigating robot (like I do with mine).
Oh wait.... you meant postage stamps, not Basic Stamps...
--- At my sig, unleash hell.
Better than home printable etching. When the magazine includes a kit that requires a board they can just include the board!!!!
You supply some soldering, a few chips to drive some things and a case and viola, instant techno-geek-thingy.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
Rolltronics talks about this as a technology for fabbing memory. But their transistors are far bigger (50x) than the ones in current memory parts, so their memories will have very low density. What's the point?
They correctly cite Ovishinsky's roll-to-roll manufacture of amorphous solar cells. That's a real product, and you can buy it. But it turned out not to be cheaper than crystalline cells. There's a niche market for flexible solar panels (they can be attached to sailboat sails), but it's not big.
The obvious application is displays. But these people haven't fabricated their first display element yet. It's way too early to consider this a breakthrough. There have been several announcements by others concerning display fabrication by printing-like processes, and some of the others are further along. It's obvious that you'd like to fab displays with a printing-like process, but so far, nobody has been able to do it, despite quite a few tries.