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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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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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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
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!
One of these days I'm going to cut you into little pieces. - PF
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.
Allready you shouldn't just be throwing away your electronic devices when they stop working.