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The Birth of Semiconductor 2.0
Roland Piquepaille writes "According to several articles in the press, an Austrian company has opened a new chip printing factory. But there is a twist. The chips produced by this factory, dubbed Semiconductor 2.0 by the company, will be organic semiconductors, and will be produced by inkjet printers. According to the company, the new factory will be able to produce 40,000 square meters of semiconductors per year, mainly for the biotech, clean tech, and defense industries."
The feature size (10-100 micrometres) is 100-2000 times what you'll get from a modern silicon fab plant (50-100 nanometres). Call it 1000 times for the sake of argument. So for every organic transistor you could instead have 1,000,000 in silicon. It's not exactly going to be a revolution in processing power. (In fact it puts us back in the early 60s).
The market is apparently cheap, disposable logic. From the sound of it, the fab plants are about 100 times cheaper for the same chip-area/year output. That means each transistor will be up to 10,000 times more expensive; it's going to have to be very simple logic to be cost-effective.
The process sounds like it could be well suited to doing small runs, so I suppose that's something.
Ah well. I will go on record as saying that this is not hugely exciting. When in 50 years' time organic semiconductors have taken over you can all mock me as appropriate :)
Inkjet printers? Man they are going to be expensive.
Libertarian Leaning Political Discussion Forum.
. . . will go to the folks who supply the ink cartridges.
Seriously, this is good news. Cheap, low performance electronics could play a big role in "leapfrogging" in the developing world. Going straight from low-tech to whoa!-tech, leaving out the capital and infrastructure intensive middle.
2.0 is so 1.0 these days, isn't it time to move on to 3.0 yet?
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Oh look! It is Roland Piquepaille providing another link to his ad filled blog. FUCK OFF Roland Piquepaille! We don't like you!
Oh wait. Never mind.
Why is it that westerners think that the developing world has to start way back in the 1960s and slowly work forwards towards the current time? That thinking is plain ignorance and does nobody any service. It is highly disrespectful of the industries that are blooming in developing countries. It also give the westerners a false sense of superiority/security: "Bah! Don't worry about them. Their technology is still stuck in 1963." One day you'll wake up and start whining because your job went to India/China/Rwanda.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I wish there was a mod for "-1 stupid fucker", but I won't waste my mod points on you anyway.
Especially as it seems someone else already is...
...that you can wear!!!
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
Now with OLED's i can order electronic food, display the picture in my OLED display and eat it.
Simple.
version 2.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Neater stuff at http://muvy.org/
FINALLY, I'll have something to run my web2.0 on.
...the term "printed circuit," doesn't it? :o)
--Tomas
Well, considering that silicon semiconductors must be somewhere around "Semiconductor 10.0" or so by now, calling something that reminds us of the early 60s "2.0" seems all right to me...
FTA: "the company has also formed alliances with water testing companies and other industrial concerns"
"The meter is showing that there's ink in the water, sir."
"Good thing we had Nanoident semiconductors; better order some more."
It's worse when you consider this tech is roughly micrometers to silicon's nanometers. 10^3x10^3 means you're looking at a millionth the area utilization of silicon. Divide 40,000 by a million and you're looking at the equivalent of 0.04 square meters of silicon or roughly that of a single 12" wafer. A whole factory to produce the equivalent of one silicon wafer a year? Not such a great boast.
Yeah, I'm sure I've got meters squared and square meters confused, messed up an area calculation or somesuch... But you get the idea.
No one posted a virus joke about the organic components. I mean its one thing to see something as totally cliche, but for a mass amount of people to think something is so cliche that everyone avoids it, now that's something.
God spoke to me.
Oh yeah.
In The Minority Report, Tom Cruise's character has in his apartment an cereal box with talking, singing cartoon characters.
Why can't I get these orgasmic semiconductors printed directly on me? Or on the GF and save me some time?
Dirt doesn't need luck.
But consider a company the bit in the article regarding one-time use applications could be a gold mine. Think food safety and "biosecurity" -- I'm seeing biochem companies jumping all over this.
meters are used as the measure of production, rather than #transistors or some other more meaningful measure. Hiding the fact that 1 sq cm only has 1000 transistors instead of 1,000,000?
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Given that the whole goal of semiconductors has been to make them smaller and smaller, boasting about how much area you can use up isn't necessarily a good thing.
What if you want things big, like Big Screen TV's? Of if it doesn't matter how dense things are (at semiconductor sizes), like DNA chips, but cost per unit is the most important factor?
This obviously isn't good for making CPU's, but where size isn't important or large is the goal - those would appear to be the addressed niches.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Seriously, it seems like everything is being turned into version numbers. Does it ever occur to them that, you know, buzzwords actually *kill meaning?*
Sometimes I wonder if I think too much.
I can just imagine 20 years from now:
"Congradulations! You have just downloaded a new video card. Print video card? [Yes] [Cancel]"
Multiplayer Gaming (defined): Sitting around, discussing single-player games with my friends, at the bar.
Organic semiconductor technology is for the low end application. The fast is for large-scale application such as solar cell. Nowadays crystalline silicon semiconductor tech cannot meet the demand, and amorphous silicon tech is so expensive, but organic solar cell efficient is low (5~6%). The second is for easy disposed application such as smart labels especially for 13.56MHz RFID tig. IMEC demonstrated organic diode that approached 50MHz at the year 2005, and Philip showed the fast 13.56MHz organic RFID tig chip at ISSCC2006. (But these processes are lithograph not printer) Organic semiconductor cannot replace the traditional crystalline silicon market, because of low charger mobility (nowadays record is going 3 cm2/Vs), but is one strong competition for amorphous silicon and polycrystalline silicon. Manufactures aim to organic semiconductor market had emerged, such as OrganicID, PolyIC, Plastic Logic, Polymer Vision, which aim to smart labels and plane display. At the end of year 2006, one IP based OTFT-LCD technology came out of the laboratory in north-east of China. Tomorrow's LCD displays will be more cheaper.
Most companies have to worry about depreciation when they can't keep their fabs running at capacity.
So does this one need to worry about the ink cartridges drying out? Moreover, how soon before their cartridges start shutting themselves off claiming they've "expired"?
Maybe, if they're really successful at miniaturisation, they can move into a smaller factory.
"Cats like plain crisps"
Man, I hope that Staples will still give me $3 off when I bring in my empty ink cartridge - I'm not looking forward to paying a few thousand to refill my Semiconductor printer!
Hey! I just pirated a $500 video card! I'm downloading a torrent of that new 8 core 128=bit CPU, too! I think I'll grab some pr0n next...
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
"In other news, Dell 2.0 announced the launch of their 100% certified organic, Free Range Computers. Offering users a healthier alternative to the highly processed artificial computers of the past."
Produced without artificial pesticides and antibiotics. Raised on open ranges with loving care and professionally slaughtered by vegetarians. No genetic modifications.
We care.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
n/t
You may be joking, but read this:
http://www.charcoaldesign.co.uk/weblog/11
exciting stuff!
doesn't that mean it'll excrete waste?
So instead of buying a compressed air can to clean out your computer, you'll need to buy a pooper-scooper too XD
The size limits the number of useful applications for now but that will improve. What concerns me is that this will be used to produce consumer products with a limited shelf life.