Slashdot Mirror
Paper-thin Integrated Circuits
EngrBohn writes "According to the EE Times, Toshiba has developed paper-thin IC packages, getting ICs down to 50microns thick. First marketed product is to be ultra-thin flash memories stacked into a SmartMedia card. Envisioned applications include mounting a circuit on a curved surface and, for the conspiracy theorists, a postage-stamp-sized transmitter & antenna that can be pasted to any surface. "
A rumor (read: I read it somewhere, but can't remember where)
Supposedly there is enough metallic content in those strips to set off airport metal detectors when large (briefcase) sized quantities are transported.
Isn't technology marvelous?
... or can they?
Things can't really get much smaller than this
and, for the conspiracy theorists, a postage-stamp-sized transmitter & antenna that can be pasted to any surface. "
so? Intel in conjunction with M$ have been doing this for years. oh? you thought that intel inside sticker was just free advertising? no no no...
NASA requires radiation-hardened chips which have been shown to be reliable. They do not use really new stuff, and they would not want to increase the vulnerability of their chips to radiation by shrinking them further.
Poodoo...
Looks like my post from work went through anyway.
[Drifts back into the shadows; trips]
The party's over
One of these days license tabs WILL BE electronic with transmitters so that nearby police will automatically be notified that a stolen car, expired registration, conceled weapon permit holder, habitual ticket getter, dead-beat dad or someone with books overdue from the library is in the area, and map out everywhere any vehicle has ever been and when by use of networked inexpensive telephone pole mounted recievers.
When you throw the term "conspiricy theory" behind this it automatically turns off thought for many people. "Oh sheesh the government would never do something like that you must be a Republican or something."
Very Orwellian and effective use of language. The government does not need but apreciates
If they can keep the price of these down we could have beacoup memory in handheld devices, the Palm X with 1 gig of memory. We'll also hopefully see more powerful handheld devices, since they can get more processing power in such a small space. Now if the screens werent so small, LEPs anyone?
NASA and telcoms that build those expensive satillites will love this. They can get higher processing to weight ratios which means more bang for their buck. Maybe we'll see this in the Centurion (you know, one of the projects to use high altitude aircraft for data transmission)
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Someday these extremly thin circuits will be embedded onto our skulls. And they will be integrated into our brains through neuron-silicon intigration. Wow. Someday I'll have a Linux Kernel running in my brain.
And some other guy will have Windows in his brain. I wonder what it'll look like when someone's mind crashes due to a Windows General Protection Fault.
Personally, I prefer the ball semiconductor approach for microelectronics on curved surfaces. :-)
Or for antenna-type structures, go for EFAB.
...and then there's that microphone reported a while back.
--The more you know, the less you know.
This stuff is not new. It's quite a few years old, in fact.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Dr. F is no longer thinking OR getting even. He is gone, and so is Frank, and so is Joel...
(sniffle...)
The House Between - Original Sci-Fi Series
Besides the fact that the heel takes an awful lot of damage, I know MY heels hurt all the time as it is. I have these big dry crusty callouse like "skins" on my heels. It's pretty bad, I can peel off peices that are more rigid than my toenails... And they HURT. I should probably go to the dermatologist or pediowhatchamacallitrist....
Something that thin might be able to be implanted into, say, the heel or another fairly well-padded part with less discomfort or detectability. That has some interesting possibilities...
Another point is that with a circuit so small, it might be easy to demolish in case of emergency (say, it's critical that it not be found intact, or perhaps even detected). Nifty.
Or one could utilize greater surface area in otherwise cramped boxes.
Yadda, yadda.
I know some government agency wanted to extend the capability of the onboard computer on cars to broadcast information via radio to nearby police cars and monitoring posts. The idea is to catch cars which are malfunctioning and poluting. But of couse they could extend it to transmit your speedometer and other readings.
Nobody has a use for five cellphones (I'm not counting creative Slashdotters here) - but what if every cornflake packet suddenly became a "buyer" of a tiny cellphone letting breakfasting kids talk to a comments site? And what if every piece of paper had a few gigs of memory sandwiched at its core? Ubiquity of chips and communications will let us build fundamentally different kinds of applications. I for one can't wait.
- Read fiction at www.espressostories.com
Crypto is going to become VERY important if this Bluetooth thing catches on. I don't want some Fed walking by and seeing everything I have in my camera's RAM. Nor do I want my neighbors sniffing my network or listening to my phone calls and music. (What would the RIAA think if anyone within 10 meters could hear your music? Oh wait, sound propagates.. they already can! Silly me.)
Speaking of which.. how about encrypted SmartMedia and/or Flash cards? "No, Officer! I don't know what's on my filmroll. I forgot the key!"
If you build in GPS, your stamp could be tracked in real time.
Satellites will do fine as receivers.
One of the neat things about the Compact Flash devices is that one of their modes of operation (controlled by the state of a couple of pins) is fully IDE compatible.
You can literally hook a CF device up to your regular IDE hard-drive cable (with the right mechanical adapters, naturally), and your system will see it as a very fast (zero seek-time) hard-drive. No extra driver overhead to worry about either.
--The more you know, the less you know.
Yeah YOU! Who did you think I was ranting to? /. story, info warfare, is scary in the same way, because if I alter your reality, control your sensory inputs, do I not have absolute control over how you think/feel/act? Is this not a way of monitoring people to the point of extinction of personal traits? Individual liberties are being taken away at an alarming rate.
The problem with all these expedient solutions is it has no understanding if it is being mis-used.
If you knew everything about everyone, you would like none. I think technology is FAR outstripping humanity. And like George Orwell, I see bleak, not because I want to, but because I see trends in the over application of quality of life(what a f****ng joke that is!).
The previous
The next generation, self dubbed the "Acid generation", knows there is nothing to base their future on. They are furious(smells like the school shooting story, eh?), and have been demoralized to the point of voilence.
Society MUST decide now what it can tolerate, otherwise, what little freedom is left wont be.
"If you teach a man to fish, he will eat for a day. Take his fishing pole, and he starves."
Posted by nobodyouknow:
I want to tell you all about these things, but evrything I do is closely watched by the post-it notes on my monitor
All you need is a foldable LCD screen, and you can have a pocket Palm Pilot that doubles as a wallet.
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
I read an article in The Australian (it's a newspaper) about advances in display technology.
They mentioned some research that had produced a flexible plastic that could display an image in a similar way to LCD. The cool thing was that the image would stay there when you cut the power -I'm not sure how quickly the display updated so it might not be suitable for anything that required animation, but 'pages' of static text would be pretty simple to do.
If you coated the back of that with bendy IC's (including flash memory) then you'd have your bendy Palm wallet.
Does anyone know any more about this techonolgy?
Felius
--
make clean; make love --without-war
..and I'll form the head!!
The possibility of bendy circuits is the most exciting to me - when I compare my wallet with my Palm III, I find that although my wallet is wider and thicker, it fits in my pocket a lot more easliy, largely because it has a small amount of 'give' and is able to contour (to a small extent) to the curve of my butt.
My Palm III, however won't curve at all and therefore causes me discomfort if I sit down with it stuffed in my back trouser pocket.
Slightly bendy electronics would probably also be a lot more resilient to bangs and knocks, as much of the kinetic energy would be transferred into bending the device rather than snapping it's components.
And what if your wallet IS the computer? No credit or ATM cards, just the wallet itself... Get rid of most paper transactions while we are at it... I like the idea of a wallet that does more than just holding useful things.
Timing is everything
The strip in the $100 bills is not any type of transmitter, nor an IC.
It is placed there to thwart counterfeiting.
Some have theorized the strip contains a unique alloy which can be tracked in large quantities (read: truckloads) from satellites. How true this is though is anybody's guess.
-=e
Hmm, so would this make UPS's and FEDex's package tracking obsolete. If you get really creative you could build instructions in the cell and maybe have it e-mail you when it reaches the terminal or when it reaches the destination, I mean of course there would have to be special recievers built for this but it is a cool idea.
Single-chip TCP/IP stacks aren't far off, and I was at a workshop not too long ago showing some of the R&D going into millimeter-wave (GHz frequency range) antennas integrated into a single chip.
:-)
Half the battle lies with the tools. Getting the electrical (digital/analog/RF) talking to the mechanical, to the thermal design tools and data is a major challenge. Holistic design is what it's called.
Very neat stuff; I'm glad I'm in the industry.
--The more you know, the less you know.
ISTR that Cray did a primitive form of this for the Cray-IV. They actaully machined off the top and bottom of ICs and made some hellishly dense interconnects...
Just junk food for thought...
"Conspiracy theorists" see uses for new
technology.
That's why they appear to be crazy.
Maybe they should be hired to "think".
Somebody once said this about me
"it's easier to think he is crazy, than it
is to listen to what he is saying"
Just lick the stamp real good [sic] to short it out. Presto! No more trackin'!
-- Not so anonymous; Just lazy
This is only tangentially relevant, but the article mentioned SmartMedia memory cards as a first application. How does SmartMedia differ from Compact Flash? Is it just another case of pointless incompatibility between two standards doing the same thing?
When it comes to transmitters, there are some who are already ahead.
Sweden's Ericsson together with IBM, Intel, Nokia and Toshiba have created an open standard technology for wireless communication called Bluetooth. The Bluetooth tranciever technology will be very cheap and low in power and is said to work even on planes. Bluetooth will have a range of up to 10 metres, 360-degree connectivity, point-to-point and point-to-multipoint connections, a gross data rate of 1 mbps, supporting Symmetrical and Asymmetrical Data rates up to 721 kbps, and support of both voice and data channels for simultaneous operation. The best thing is that it uses the open band of radio frequency which is available all over the world!
You might not have heard much about yet in America since it seems futile to get American media (including Slashdot...*mumble mumble*) to report on it, but interest in the system is rocketing and it is very hot in Europe. Over 750 companies have joined the Special Interest Group so far.
Already developed is a headset for your cell phone which lets you speak even if the phone is in your bag. (You will defenitely be taken for a loon when you go around on the streets talking to yourself with this one), a harddrive that automatically connect to thin clients anywhere(thereby working as PDAs) and many other things. Other early products is expected to be stereo speakers that you can place anywhere in the room (you still need a power cord of course), digital cameras from Casio, ID numbers to track stolen cars, cheap wireless LANs from 3Com, smart card readers, washing machines that call the repairman when broken, mobile phones that can double as remotes for your TV or to unlock your car, and other products. For computer users an early benefit is that we might finally get rid of the cable "spaghetti" behind the computer and the stereo. It is also said that the Calcaria Linux7K project (or Linux CL-PS7110) is interested in Bluetooth, something that makes Microsoft a bit worried since it seriously threatens Microsoft CE. The name Bluetooth comes from a Viking king who ruled Denmark and southern Sweden.
Read more at The official Bluetooth homepage and the ZDnet UK Bluetooth Special Report.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
They already have something that thin and small right now. Developed by IBM, it's called a Gamma Tag. The antenna would have to be larger, something about the size of a metered stamp sticker- a standard postage stamp doesn't have the space to allocate an antenna long enough to provide power for backscatter operation to send back a signal from the chip.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
Hmm, little becons that blip to the Cell sites or something. Send a letter and know exactly where it is at all times?
Gosh, haven't they been going this with $100.00 bills since the early 80's?
As kooky as it might sound, if this is technically possible now (and we are only just hearing about it, so the NSA probably has known for about 5 years), maybe there's something to that "Alien abduction implant" stuff. I'm not suggesting that there really are little Grey aliens implanting transmitters in people to track them the same way we track bears or birds, but up until now one of the arguements against this has been that it is technically impossible or unfeaseable. Not so much now if you can create a paper thin transmitter, perhaps at nano-scales.
This brings up more Orwellian and X-files paranoia than 2 grams of mushrooms!
Well, time for my medication...
"There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy..."
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha