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."

Comments

Hardly Semiconductor 2.0

[26199]

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 :)

Re:Hardly Semiconductor 2.0

[MITEgghead]

There are actually cases when you want one cheap big transistor as opposed to a million tiny ones. For instance, if you have a display, also made of organics, with pixels around a millimeter then you can manufacture driving circuits on the same substrate even directly below the pixel. This keeps costs low and allows new flexible substrates to be used for mobile applications. Other applications from the article are biotech and military where the transistors would be used as part of real-time biological/chemical detectors which need relatively large areas to pick up enough of the substance to be detected.

The bottom line is that no one thinks these things are going to be doing heavy-duty logic. But they can certainly do easy logic cheaply and in novel applications.