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Plastic Circuits Designed To Enable Tough, Green Computers
DanS writes "Computerworld has an article about two Australian engineers who have invented 'Circuits in Plastic' technology. CIP designs aim to be more environmentally friendly than traditional circuits as they can be made from recycled plastic, don't contain any hazardous substances, and since packaging is part of the base circuit board, there is no need for additional packaging material. As an added bonus, different 3D shaped circuits can be made using CIP, which are also waterproof. No more ruining cell phones by getting them wet! The hope is that the technology will reduce the amount of toxic electronic waste in landfills, as even with lead-free technology, etching of existing printed circuit boards (and disposal of the chemicals) is a significant issue during manufacturing."
I'd love to start using this tech in my prototypes. The big question of course is how this stuff compares to an equivalently functional traditional PCB in price.
Another question that comes to mind has to do with the well established design principles used in RF level circuits. Parasitic capacitance calculations and all of the nastiness that goes along with it will become even more like black magic now that it has crossed into the third dimension.
Women are like electronics: you don't know how damaged they are until you try to turn them on.
If this process is going to be mainstream they'll have to get some kind of cost benefit attached, otherwise the only way there is going to be a switch is through legislation.
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According to the article the circuits can be made from recycled plastic and then when they are ready to be retired the components of the circuits themselves can be recycled into new circuits. Seems like it really is a bit of a step up in several ways.
Of course now our electronics will have to be added to the list of things we can't just throw away when they quit working. I mean... there's plastic IN there.
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In the near future, we design artificial intelligence and put it to work for us. In fifty years, biodegradable robots packaged in ecofriendly human hide take over. This'll just make it easier for them to recycle their dead while we work in their salt mines.
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How will they achieve this without encasing all the components in the plastic, even if the board conductors were all encased (it's not like the anti-solder screen [green stuff on the board] could not be made waterproof and I think it already is) at least some of the components simply cannot be (due to heat dissipation problems). I have made completely waterproof circuit boards (simple PWM stuff, they don't generate enough heat for it to be an issue), the only connectors are rated for underwater and the board encased with epoxy, not really repairable though...
So anyways, since some of the components must be exposed they will have exposed connectors ergo water getting in will short-circuit it.
I don't know if it would work to use only such active components that have connector-bar on the underside and then just encase it up to the sides but this would add significant cost (connectors themselves, size of components -> board size...) and repair would still be out of the question.
So the battery is encased in plastic as well and thus can't be recharged by an external connection?
There are also no other external connectors like headphone jacks or USB ports?
There are plenty of technologies to waterproof electronics, they are just limited by the above inconveniences. The reason that the traditional circuit manufacturing technique is so environmentally unfriendly is because it is incredibly cheap. There are all sorts of ways it could be made more environmentally sound (like not shipping "recycled" electronics to Africa/China to be broken up by children), but it is not going to happen without significant market or government intervention.
And plastics aren't that great environmentally to begin with, even if they contain significant amounts of recycled material.
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Wireless power, wireless headphones, wireless computer sync. Cell phones tend to lead the way in these wireless matters anyway, they have every reason to say these will all be plausible before this becomes mainstream.
See my point above about heat dissipation, encasing everything in plastic that is very poor conductor of heat is not an option.
One of the major reasons many businesses outsourced their electronics production was because of environmental and workplace safety issues due to the heavy metals and solvents used and left over. If widely adopted, this sort of thing could jump start a mini industrial revolution. I would think that re-usable components would reduce the cost of replacement parts on all electronic devices, especially with widespread adoption. Do you have any idea how many perfectly good resistors and capacitors lie in landfills? And the amount of chemical waste to produce those wasted components... Big business would have to be pretty ignorant to pass this one up if it works half as well as it appeared to on the video. Also, as someone who has worked in most aspects of electronics manufacture (PCB fab, IC fab, IC packaging, and SMD / through hole assembly and test from r&d to mass production scales), I could see this process being more efficient and less costly than current SMD and PCB manufacturing. Hard to say for sure without finding out more, but this looks hopeful!
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Slowly. It really depends upon how well these materials conduct heat if you don't have the luxury of putting a great big lump of copper on everything that gets hot. Conduction has a nice simple linear relationship so it's not going to be hard for designers to work out and it will certainly limit things.
A nice parallel example is the all ceramic engine craze of the early 1990s. In the end the extra weight required to run extra cooling was one of the things that killed the concept, but now ceramic parts are used in various bits. We may see polymer electronics in some places with copper heatsinks stuck to them where it makes sense. The phone example is probably a good one since they get stuck in places where they are well insulated any so you would want a design that produces very little heat anyway - polymers may be a good choice. There can't be very many phones left that will be destroyed by turning them on and wrapping them in a blanket
If anybody is interested the two inventors of this technology where recently on the ABC's show "New Inventors". The episode they were in is here (mp4 format). Or you can probably find the clip which has only their invention here.
Embedding electronic components and circuit pathways into hunks of plastic sounds like a fairly obvious evolutionary step up from the printed circuit board. If they can make the manufacturing process is cheap enough, I can't see why it wouldn't be the standard for consumer electronics in the foreseeable future.
Some downsides to consider:
Prototyping will be more difficult. If you discover a fatal bug in a non-trivial circuit, it can't be jumpered or otherwise worked around easily.
Calling it a "green" technology is insidious. Sure the manufacturing processes may involve fewer chemicals, but the resulting hunks of plastic are going to be much more difficult to recycle than components laid out on a PCB. The electronics industry is already a throw-away-when-obsolete economy, this will only help expand the concept further.
Hackers are going to have a much more difficult time modifying and repurposing their gear. You can't just solder and desolder the components and rewire things to make them do what you want. I guess many manufacturers will consider this a security feature (e.g., no more modchips on video game consoles). Reverse engineering hardware will also be more tricky. Where you might have needed a screwdriver before, you'll now need a drill.
Upsides to consider:
Building your own computer will basically be like playing with big Legos with drives, memory, and GPUs inside them.
I had to go check and, yep, my current cell phone is completely encased in plastic. It would seem that thermal issues are not the problem you make them out to be. Is there some indication that these new plastics would somehow be less thermally conductive?
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The Griffith university site has well over a dozen pages sparsely filled and with essentially zero technical information about this. Amazing.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
I cannot find anywhere how this system interconnects the components.
They write about the issues of current technology (solder containing lead, chemicals for etching PCB boards), but don't give an insight how their technology works around these problems. Encasing your whole device in plastic is neat, but the components will still have to be interconnected.
How? I cannot find it in the article, nor on the site of Griffith University.
More to the point, what current cellphones are damaged by getting them a bit wet? Quite a few people I know have dropped their phones into puddle, down drains, and (in one case) into the toilet and had them work. One person I know dropped his phone in the sea. He needed to wash it off with fresh water to make sure there was no salt corroding the circuits and then leave it to dry before turning it back on, but that was all.
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I saw this. The designers claim it works out about 10% cheaper than conventional PCBs.
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