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World's First Ultra-Thin Multilayer Circuit Board
neutron_p writes "Seiko Epson has developed the world's first 20-layer circuit board. Multilayer circuit boards are normally produced by using a photolithography. However, the industry has struggled to produce thin, lightweight, high-density multilayer circuit boards. Seiko Epson uses an inkjet-based manufacturing process, which has many advantages over a traditional photolithography process."
Seiko Epson uses an inkjet-based manufacturing process, which has many advantages over a traditional photolithography process
Great. Now I'm going to have to run out in the middle of the night to buy overpriced Epson inkjet refills in two aisles.
And the paperjams on a PCB? Insane.
Man wouldn't it be cool if it was flexible? Probably wishful thinking.
This signature has Super Cow Powers
Because I think this could be another significant price reduction for people who want to try their hand at manufacturing hardware/embedded devices in their garage.. buy a 150 dollar inkjet, some special paper and conductive/insulator ink, and print up all your designs.
and the less barrier there is to entry in an industry, the more the competition, and the faster/better the growth.
I don't know how I'm going to keep from breaking one of these things every time I touch it. I have broken some thicker-than-ultra-thin PCBs in my day and don't imagine these to be any less susceptible to the pressure of my indelicate hands. I wonder if/hope we'll see some connectors/slots in the future that don't require a board-breaking effort to slip the peripheral cards out.
Seems to be a good match :)
.. I wonder if raw postscript could be used to run these printers ?.
.... of EUPHORIA . I still remember my first bistable vibrator done on a breadboard , and seeing those leds go blink ... blink .. blink ...
:)
Inkjets + Epson == PCB printers
It would be amazing to be able to print out PCBs rather than sending your diagrams to a shop. Even if this doesn't work for a production system, it would be great for hobbyists to create throwaway prototypes of circuits before sending those designs in.
Also this brings a new way of "compiling" your circuit boards
Finally, those kids in college can really see their circuits in action rather than as blinking circles in some circuit simulator !. It's a real good feeling
<old_voice>
"Those days we didn't have zeros and ones either - all we had was Vcc , ground and everything in between... and we liked it"
</old_voice>
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I don't believe this technology will replace the conventional multilayer printed circuit board for some time. At least in mass produced consumer electronics. Perhaps some niche market where there is a requirement that each circuit board is different.
The main advantage of this new technology is that it is relatively cheaper to produce a small quantity of boards because there is no high cost of making masks. Most of the money today is made with consumer electronics where there is a requirement of large series of identical boards so this is no longer such an advantage (the starting cost of mask is almost zero after 1000 or so boards).
The article also does not mention how this type of circuit board is compatible with electronic components. I guess you can not solder SMDs to a trace that is composed of tiny silver particles. This probably means that a totaly new technology for mounting electronic components needs to be developed. The classical soldered spot is one of the most reliable components in electronics and I don't believe any new technology will surpass that anytime soon (this is not so unimportant, considering that an average circuit can have 100s or 1000s of soldered spots).
consumer electronics weren't already hard enough to repair. This will take them to a whole new level of discard-and-replace.
Once upon a time there were technicians that could take any piece of consumer electronics, and given a good repair manual, trouble shoot the problem and replace the offending component.
This creates a monopoly of sorts - since repair is impossible, the manufacturer has sole control over their product, so their profit margin increases. It behooves them to create products that cannot be repaired.
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
...contact cement with the same silver particles stirred into it?
I can see a couple of limitations which aren't discussed in the article.
Firstly, thin layers of silver particles mean very limited power supplies. The thin layers of insulation will also limit the working voltage. This can be overcome so some extent by printing multiple layers, but that may cause problems in the drying/curing process.
Secondly, the thin layer of insulation will result in significantly higher capacitance between layers. This will probably limit high frequency applications and result in every other layer being a ground plane to limit coupling in other applications.
Still, it's a step in the right direction.
Keith.
Unless I'm confusing my terms, the Seiko-Epson board is not the first board to hit 20 layers. As I recall, the backplane in the Sun E10K was a 27 layer board that was hand designed. Granted, it wasn't built in the same manner as the Seiko-Epson board, and they probably aren't anywhere close to the same beast.
no one seems to be picking up on the implications of INKJET PRINTABLE ELECTRONICS ::
Open Source Hardware!!!!!
download a design for a gadget off 'hardforge', print it out, and away you go. Dont like a design feature on the latest open ipod clone: change it yourself and print a personal custom model.
watch "the money masters" on google video
As someone that has done many circuit board designs over the years, I can say that this is _not_ the first 20 layer PWB. Many backplanes for large systems are built with 20 layer or more.
What looks to be new is the fast, cheap, and hopefully environmentaly friendly way to make boards. Also, from the picture, this has to be the thinnest 20 layer board by far - a distinct advantage in light weight hand held devices. But the thin board raises some questions for board designers such as "what is the trace impedance". However, that's one of many details that we won't know the answer to until the technology is commercialized (oooo, a nounized verb!!!)
The company is misinformed... From the article:
what the company believes is the world's first 20-layer circuit board.
I have held in my hand 28 layer PCBs. Now if they said it was 20 signal layers, not including ground and power planes, so it would be more like 40 to 50 layers, now that would be something.
However I give them full props for the thinness and the printing technology.
Here's my letter to PhysOrg.com:
...contains an absurdly incorrect statement in its first sentence, to wit:
Hello,
The article...
http://www.physorg.com/news1789.html
"Seiko Epson Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in leveraging its proprietary inkjet technology to develop what the company believes is the world's first 20-layer circuit board."
No. Not even close. I have personally worked on circuit boards of as many as 48 layers, as long ago as 1985. The math coprocessor for the Sperry-1100/90 (code named "Eagle") had a motherboard that was roughly 20" x 36" in size, had forty-eight layers, was about 1/2" thick, had solid silver bus bars laminated in each side, weighed about forty pounds, and was so hard that if you knocked on it with your knuckle, it would ring like a bell.
There is no possibility that the people at Epson believe they've built the world's first twenty layer board. Twenty layer boards are a little uncommon, but far from record-breaking.
Sincerely,
BrakesForElves
Founder and past President
FASTechnologies, Inc. www.fastec.com
About the word "if": If bullfrogs had wings, they wouldn't bounce around on their little green butts.
I can see this working very will for hybrid integrated circuit manufacturing.
First the circuit is printed.
Next the conductive cement is printed.
Finally a component transfer drum 'prints' the components on to the board.
The drum could made of a plastic on a rapid prototype machine and mounted in a loader (drum rotates and components are dropped into pockets)
for small runs. For large runs the drum would serve as a pattern for something that woudl hold up longer.
The result is a very rapid transition from CAD/modeling stage to large scale production.
Refinements for projects you know from the get go are going to be big would include printed resistors and capacitors. A series of printers with multiple heads for the various 'ink' flavors would work best for this. Resistance with a few ink mixes and pattern/width for values within ranges. In this scenario you only need to 'print' active devices and larger inductors and capacitors. All else is done with the ink.
I bet this technology will be up and running before then end of 2005 and cranking out helmet electronics for military, wrist watch cell phones, and some really cool Cracker Jack(tm) toys.
Do not look into LASER with remaining eye!
This tech isn't limited to circuits.
one could print other chemistry (battery, sensor, display, etc) right on the board. I can see ultra thin $3 wristwatches where the watch and battery are integrated into the band.
Do not look into LASER with remaining eye!
Unless this new technology is vastly different from existing ones, it will be good for them and bad for us. I've dealt with very thin boards a few times and I hate them! Why you say?
Ultra thin boards break their solder joints very easily. Thermal cycling seems to affect thinner boards more than thicker ones and leads to bad solder joints. Unless the resulting boards are small and have a LOT of mounting points they flex and break, especially if the boards are large.
Unless the thing can flex like an acordion without breaking solder joints, or the entire resulting circuit is printed in this way (no drilled holes or surface mount components) I'd hate to even touch one of these.
I've still got a bare board in my office as a souvenir.
Seiko Epson may well have come up with a new technique, but it's certainly not the world's first twenty layer board.
This guy always posts stories with links to physorg.com which other people have noted is a site that rips off other news sites' stories and throws in a bunch of ads for revenue. You can check out his submission history here (18 submissions accepted in the last 50 days or so):
http://slashdot.org/search.pl?query=neutron_p
Do we have another Roland on our hands? Why not just post a link to the original story on the original news site?
I'm not the first person to point out that 20 layers is nothing. It's unusual, for sure; most "low-tech" boards in appliances are just 2-layer, or even 1-layer. It takes a lot of wire links to make it worth going to double-sided; not only have you got to do two lots of photography and line them up to within a few um. and plate through the holes, but double-sided PCB material is almost always FR4 {glass fibre} whereas single-sided boards may be FR2 {SRBP} or CEM1 {paper / woven ceramic fibre}. The problem is that the through-hole plating -- which joins one layer to another -- doesn't take well in the cheaper materials. So, unless you have good creepage and clearance or physical space reasons, it's preferable to use wire links. If your VCD machine {Variable Centres Distance -- i.e. two-ended through-hole placement} has the capability to cut wire links off a reel of bare tinned copper wire, as opposed to requiring wire links on tape and reel, so much the better. {When you're not populating PCBs with the VCD machine, or if you have a lot of radial [single ended] parts on your boards such as electrolytic capacitors, you can use the sequencer for assembling kits of parts for hand placement.}
Another problem with multi-layer boards is vias {a via is a plated-through hole just used for connecting one layer to another, not carrying a component lead}. The way the plating process works means that all copper layers will be joined to each other. So you can't join, say 1-2 and 4-5 at the same hole; and you soon run out of sites if you aren't very careful. So more than 10 layers is rare, because there is usually a better way to do what you were trying to do.
Still, with 20 layers it's possible to print actual coils, not just bent bits of wire that only look like a coil at UHF and above, and capacitors. A printed coil ought to be more reliable than a wound one. Perhaps we'll start seeing more circuits that use real inductances!
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"Seiko Epson Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in leveraging its proprietary inkjet technology to develop what the company believes is the world's first 20-layer circuit board."
Has become....
"Seiko Epson Corporation today announced that it has succeeded in leveraging its proprietary inkjet technology to develop ultra-thin 20-layer circuit board."
Nice job!
It seems like this would mean you would have to worry even more about how you laid out the traces on your board. Since they will be even closer together between layers, I would think there would be a greater risk of capacitance between them. That could cause some rather strange behavior. Sadly, though, I don't have my E&M textbook handy, though, so I can't check the math on distance/voltage limits here. I suppose the board will have to be run at a lower voltage anyway to keep from melting, no? Sorry, I didn't go to Seiko's site to look for specs, just the news article. So, if these questions have been answered already, I appologize.