Slashdot Mirror
Circuits Everywhere
cpk0 writes "ABCNews is reporting on a small, New York based company that is now using and creating a technique of printing circuits directly onto paper with conductive inks. The uses up to this point are somewhat trivial, but the idea is undeniably exciting, and the article outlines some of the future ideas T-Ink Inc. has for this technology." Including electronic candy, oddly enough. Update: 10/27 17:24 GMT by T : Associated Press Technology Editor Frank Bajak points out that this story comes from The Associated Press, which deserves the credit.
You could combine this with electronic ink and have a fingerprint verification system built into a piece of paper, and then if it isn't activated by a verified fingerprint, you can't read the contents... the possibilities for this are interesting.
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Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.
Widespread adoption of RFID tags is being delayed by cost. Though much of it is due to the chip, which can't be printed, printing the antenna part could help bring the total price down.
Some bloke found that you could print the patterns using a laser printer and the tomer was conductive enough for the purpose.
Of course you probably need something a bit more conductive to make useful PCBs. I guess you could do something wierd like electroplating the toner.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The question is not 'can you put out a press release', more 'can you do something useful and get it to market'.
I made printed circuits almost 20 years ago by drawing patterns with a lead (graphite) pencil. I made a resister network for a static charge meter this way. It used a calculator LCD display as a bar graph. India ink (carbon black in water with a little gum arabica) is also conductive and can be used to draw circuits. I've also had to threaten an engineer that was writing comments on prototype circuit boards. The ink from his marker was weakly conductive and making intermittant glitches. I hadn't thought about this in a long time - may be time to dust off some of those old circuit designs and re-create them on a paper circuit board with surface-mount components and conductive ink. There are plenty of conductive glues (and home brew compounds) that could be used as "solder". With appropriate insulating glues one could even do multi-layer "boards".
Chaos maximizes locally around me.
As somebody who works with soldering more than he wants to - I can tell you that paper isn't such a impossible item to solder onto (provided that the conductive ink bonds to solder)
Anyhoo - if you don't go crazy with the heat, paper doesn't even char. Going with 450 degrees (celcius here) will char your paper if you leave the tip on long enough, but due to the high heat-insulation properties of paper, you should never need to do it in the first place.
The problem is actually the heat-insulation property: molten solder does not solidify half as fast on paper as they do on PCB. Of course, this comes back to the "go easy on the temperature dial" thing mentioned earlier, but if not careful it can be annoying. It is even half fun to drip some molten solder on a sheet of paper - you can roll it around while it's liquid (This is, without saying, dangerous - so perform at your own risk).
So, I don't see this being terribly problematic. Print multiple sheets and use rivets as via will get you multi-layered circuits. Of course - I wouldn't expect the traces to be beautiful 50-ohm lines, but I doubt you will be putting any 10GHz serdes chips on there either, eh?
p.s. use of surface mount components will be HIGHLY recommended.
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Combine T-ink with E-ink and you have a playing card that is like a little nintendo... Or Better yet, all those trading card games could REALLY interact with a "player".. so you lay down your cards and they literally store hitpoints and such, or special moves/rules/ etc.
meh