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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."
Watch, as I wear a circuit board. :)
And verily, those little LED's that are flashing are part of a binary adder.
It's one up on a T-Shirt with perl code or Pi on it
He proudly unpacks the company's demo unit: ......
... science fairs, etc. -- and gives me a frightening glimpse into my future. *sigh* I think I need to get out more.
.. the reduction of costs for things like LCD panels could make a lof our cool dream gadgets become an affordable reality ... I just hope the economy doesn't end up killing this research ..
Ok, so the demo is lame. I can just see his big dorky grin as he gets all excited about his little blinking LED. Reminds me of my past
Anyway, this does sound cool
Groove Salad -- a nicely chilled plate of ambient grooves and beats.
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.
...each with its own clever phrase for that day. I wonder how long it will be before someone offers a "full-service" laundromat with T-shirts made of this material. Take your T-shirts to the cleaners, and get them back with a fresh supply of clever phrases for the next month. Of course the upload mechanism will be encrypted so you have to go back to get another batch of fresh clever phrases. This could give a hi-tech twist to the old saying..."no ticket, no laundry".
Why aren't we told when an Editor moderates our posts?
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
Has a whole new meaning now.
I just can't imagine a Beowulf wardrobe of these things!
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.
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...
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?
Forget having a T-Shirt with the DeCSS code on it, plug a DVD into one sleave and the Computer into the other ... =p
Heck.. now you can go to a wallpaper store and say.. I want the geek wallpaper and they'll probably pull out a coupla rolls of this for ya to use! and heck it'll even do SOMETHING too!
Moderation points: Funny: +1
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.
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!
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.
Flex's are made using a similar process to that used to make printed circuit board. A layer of copper is stuck to a sheet of plastic and then photo etched. This is cheap but not as cheap as a normal printing process.
Plus, we have alloys which can be deposited on substrates a micron-layer at a time.
This can be done (crisp packets for example (sorry - chip packets for you yanks)) but most processes require high temperatures which don't do much good to a layer of plastic.
How tough is it to dope conducting inks with Gallium-Arsenide? (Or whatever).
Physics Today have an article about the University of Cambridge printing transistors using ink jet printers. Conducting inks are not unusual - indeed most mass produced PCBs are put together with screen printed solder paste. Its a bit of a step to call this an ink but it gives you an idea of what's possible.
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."
The devel is in the detail. Sure I can demonstrate printing to you using some chimney soot and half a potato. Its quite a bit harder to produce a 100,000 copies of a newspaper (including those AOL CD's) for just a few pence. Development always takes many times longer than you think and far more money.
wot no sig
"Sauvante believes that Intel and other chip-making giants "are essentially jostling around a pie that's getting smaller and smaller, instead of going out to find the game-changing new paradigm. That's what Rolltronics represents.""
This isn't going to change the game. CPUs and other computer chips still need to get smaller and faster. This technology is great, but in the world of power chips, it amounts to nothing!
Imperium et libertas
Autocracy and freedom
Like I don't have enough printer support headaches at work already.
I can just imagine the calls I'll be getting from my boss now:
"Foo Fighter, my printer is smearing my traces all over the place. Could you come by and clean it so I can finish printing my new Palm?"
Or:
"Foo, I was printing my PowerPoint slide show, but the headlines are blinking red instead of blue. And the line chart on page three only animates halfway, then stops. Could you get over here right away and fix this?"
Or:
"Those nanobots I printed and released into the fish tank to monitor polution yesterday have eaten my goldfish. Could you come up with some new nanobots to eat the bad nanobots?"
Great. Just Great.
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Look at it this way - CPUs have become much cheaper over time because manufacturing processes have been developed to reduce the size of each transistor, allowing you to fit more on a wafer of a given size, whilst increasing the size of the wafers - and the cost per wafer has not increased at the same exponential rate as the transistor count per wafer. Since it is ok that the transistors are smaller, this is a good thing. However, this model doesn't work for things where you actually want the device to be big - like a flat panel display or (as the article says) an X-Ray panel (think detector in an airport that you walk through).
What this technology does is provides a compelling economic model for large items that isn't served by conventional manufacturing processes.
One more thing - this uses amorphous silicon, also a good thing for large items in that the absence of the need for crystallinity is a big help for yield - but at the same time don't expect it to break any speed records.
Bottom line - this is a really cool technology, but it isn't going to be used for one-off roll-your-own CPUs.
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.
Perusing Rolltronics' web site I came across this interesting nugget:
Multilevel Organic Solid State Memory
It seems you can stack up these sheets and make very dense memory out of it. Here is a quote from the article:
"They will be available in different form factors, ranging from single sheets where minimum thickness is important to stacks which can easily be put into a product that offers a terabyte of storage in a package no bigger than a pad of paper."
Appropriately enough, the author's name is Dr. Sheats.
Actually, Rolltronics does claim a memory technology on their site. The technology description is rather vague, but the general idea seems to be to sandwich a huge array of tiny LEDs together with light-sensitive capacitive elements that do the actual storage.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
I'm afraid that, cool as we all think it would be to print out electronics (and boy would it), that printable electronics is going to show up about a week before the flying car, if at all. Rolltronics was RSN on its product about a year ago, too.
IP is just rude.
Is there any torture so subl