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Toys Technology Hardware

Circuits Everywhere 144

Posted by timothy from the smart-facial-tissue dept.
cpk0 writes "ABCNews is reporting on a small, New York based company that is now using and creating a technique of printing circuits directly onto paper with conductive inks. The uses up to this point are somewhat trivial, but the idea is undeniably exciting, and the article outlines some of the future ideas T-Ink Inc. has for this technology." Including electronic candy, oddly enough. Update: 10/27 17:24 GMT by T : Associated Press Technology Editor Frank Bajak points out that this story comes from The Associated Press, which deserves the credit.
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Circuits Everywhere More

Circuits Everywhere

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  • So... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Empiric ( 675968 ) * on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:32AM (#7317506)
    Hardwarez?
    • I do not understand why the aove got modded as a troll, it might be only one neologism long but it is by far the most obvious (hence insightful) comment this story could get...

      The only other consequence I could imagine would be to couple this technology with AI, then I'd guess we could get some self-expanding hardware machine...
      • Thanks... I was actually originally planning a more long-winded statement about possible implications of this, but realized this one pseudo-word captured it concisely.

  • Old technology (Score:2, Interesting)

    by quigonn ( 80360 )
    For those interested, this company [radioshack.com] sells this technology for home use for over 15 years already.

  • Printed Circuits! (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Surely we've seen this before. Electrical engineers have been using those metal pens for years. Honestly, with this method you still need a specialized printer. A conductive ink wouldn't be any better then say, a printed metal circuit. If the cost of a cartridge of ink for my HP is any indication, it wouldn't be cheaper either!

    • Re:Printed Circuits! (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I don't know. I think it'd be pretty cool if all the circuit scematics my computer logic design professor made us do could actually be functional on the paper.
  • Then we will really see some novel uses for this stuff.

  • Hmm! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JanusFury ( 452699 ) <kevin...gadd@@@gmail...com> on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:37AM (#7317525) Homepage Journal
    You could combine this with electronic ink and have a fingerprint verification system built into a piece of paper, and then if it isn't activated by a verified fingerprint, you can't read the contents... the possibilities for this are interesting.

  • RFID tags (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:38AM (#7317528)
    For RFID tag haters, here's an interesting tid-bit from the article:

    Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.

    Widespread adoption of RFID tags is being delayed by cost. Though much of it is due to the chip, which can't be printed, printing the antenna part could help bring the total price down.

    • Re:RFID tags (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Brackney ( 257949 )
      Some friends and I were having a discussion about the new twenty dollar bills here in the US. It suddenly occurred to me that there's a really exciting opportunity for paper circuitry and RFID tagging here. I can't wait for the day when a device can passively scan me to know how much money I have on my person. And just think of the data mining opportunities. I'm sure marketing department loins are already stirring...

      (Sarcasm mode active for the humor impaired)
      • ..And, wait'll they start checking the tabs in your credit cards...:)

        "Sorry, sir, you can't come into the store. Come again when your account has enough credit..."

      • I'm sure that the technology will be replicated and sold to the more unscrupulous people of this planet who could then know how much money you have on you.

        Hmmm...he's only got $10, but this guy on the other hand has $150, let's go mug him.
      • The European Union is already on the job. Euros will have RFID tags someday.

  • What about components? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jkrise ( 535370 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:39AM (#7317532) Journal
    I mean, what good is a circuit without components? It's be half interesting if I draw a diode and the 'conductive ink' actually soldered a diode on the 'paper'. This thing is just for the circuit board.

    Much ado about less than nothing, IMO.

    -
    • Well, drawing capacitors and resistors should work, at least vaguely... inductors may be harder. :-)
      • If you can print a conductive ink you can print an isolating one too. So you can print any circuit if you're willing to do multiple passes (wich is quite common in offset printing), and that includes some 'component circuits' like inductors as well.
        And when when you can print transistors...

        Believing the results from a commercial IQ test isn't very smart...
    • Depending upon the ink used, many components could be simply drawn on the circuit board. Resistors, capicitors, and inductors would be trivial (within limited values of course). Semiconductor components could be surface mount types, attached with conductive glue.

    • Solder them (Score:5, Interesting)

      by lingqi ( 577227 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @05:28AM (#7317650) Journal
      As somebody who works with soldering more than he wants to - I can tell you that paper isn't such a impossible item to solder onto (provided that the conductive ink bonds to solder)

      Anyhoo - if you don't go crazy with the heat, paper doesn't even char. Going with 450 degrees (celcius here) will char your paper if you leave the tip on long enough, but due to the high heat-insulation properties of paper, you should never need to do it in the first place.

      The problem is actually the heat-insulation property: molten solder does not solidify half as fast on paper as they do on PCB. Of course, this comes back to the "go easy on the temperature dial" thing mentioned earlier, but if not careful it can be annoying. It is even half fun to drip some molten solder on a sheet of paper - you can roll it around while it's liquid (This is, without saying, dangerous - so perform at your own risk).

      So, I don't see this being terribly problematic. Print multiple sheets and use rivets as via will get you multi-layered circuits. Of course - I wouldn't expect the traces to be beautiful 50-ohm lines, but I doubt you will be putting any 10GHz serdes chips on there either, eh?

      p.s. use of surface mount components will be HIGHLY recommended.
      • Going with 450 degrees (celcius here) will char your paper if you leave the tip on long enough, but due to the high heat-insulation properties of paper, you should never need to do it in the first place.

        IIRC, "Fahrenheit 451" refers to the flash point of paper required for proper book burning. That would be Fahrenheit, not (whap!clue) Celcius.

        But if you were to implement an IBM 360 processor on paper then you could implement the Halt and Catch Fire instruction from the over-extended instruction set.

    • All we need now is N-doped ink and P-doped ink to print semiconductors on to the paper. Add a higher resistance ink (for resistors), couple of grades of insulator ink (one for creating capacitors and the other for cross-overs), and a magnetic ink (for creating inductors) and you can create all manner of circuits. While we are at it, we might as well use inks that lead to OLEDs for nice light-emitting properties.

      The only problem: our printed semicondutors will be exposed to light and so the circuit may

  • Tattoos? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by skinfitz ( 564041 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:40AM (#7317535) Journal
    Could the same be done with Tatoos using conductive ink?

    Could perhaps make an interesting component of a digital ID scheme. Of course one would need one on the forhead and one on the right hand.

    13:16 And he causeth all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and bond, to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads:

    13:17 And that no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.
    Revelations...

    Notice mark "in" forehead or hand - most likely a reference to RFID chips. Woooo!

  • Before anyone else gets this one in... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Zog The Undeniable ( 632031 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:41AM (#7317537)
    Pr0n magazines that moan when you stroke the pictures!

  • Necessary Functionality (Score:5, Funny)

    by CGP314 ( 672613 ) <CGP@ColinGregor y P a lmer.net> on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:42AM (#7317539) Homepage
    The uses up to this point are somewhat trivial

    Trivial? Just wait until you see my bookshelf beowulf!

  • Regular laser printer toner is conductive (Score:5, Interesting)

    by EmbeddedJanitor ( 597831 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:43AM (#7317543)
    At one place I worked we used conductive tracks inside some access cards we'd designed. The machine to print these was extremely complicated and unreliable.

    Some bloke found that you could print the patterns using a laser printer and the tomer was conductive enough for the purpose.

    Of course you probably need something a bit more conductive to make useful PCBs. I guess you could do something wierd like electroplating the toner.

    • Re:Regular laser printer toner is conductive (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      shut up, you lying sack of shit. Printer toner is pulverized plastic. Dispersants for toner particles must be nonconductive, to avoid discharging the latent electrostatic image.

  • Been done, better, elsewhere (Score:5, Interesting)

    by sane? ( 179855 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:44AM (#7317546)
    Take a look at this metal printing solution [qinetiq.com] which has been around for a while and looks to be less marketing press shot and more substance.

    The question is not 'can you put out a press release', more 'can you do something useful and get it to market'.

    • A boardgame (Score:2, Informative)

      by snoweel ( 719438 )
      Interesting timing, as King Arthur [brettboard.dk], a new boardgame using conductive ink just premiered at the big Essen game fest in Germany. This should count as a useful application.
  • I think the uses for this stops when you're thinking of building anything large out of it, simply because of the clumsiness of paper (and the obviously incineration ;) )
    • Remind me not to overclock my paper on analytic processing... especially not if it's funded by AMD!
      • My thoughts exactly! This heralds the triumphant return of Halt And Catch Fire to modern equipment!

        And now, entertain mental images of laconic commuters drearily riding the subway home at night when suddenly somebody's wallet or purse bursts into flames. I'd have to point and laugh, because hey, what were you doing with that paper PCB? Finding the next largest prime? [sound of super nerdy laughter]

    • Re:Paper = burn (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Narphorium ( 667794 )
      Just because it's flammable, doesn't make it useless. Considering the low cost of such a product, I would think it would be feasible to make electonic wallpaper that can tell fire fighters which walls are on fire and which ones are still able to pass current through them.

      Of course, most uses of this technology wouldn't use regular printer paper. I'm sure it prints on sheets of plastic or cloth as well.

    • Actually, paper will most likely not ignite under these conditions, because it requires a significant heat source in order for it to burn.

      You can put a sheet of paper into an oven at 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Farenheit), and it will not catch fire (unless you place it in direct contact with the heating element). However, you can use any butane lighter and easily set a sheet a paper on fire (because lighters burn their fuel at 300+ degrees Celsius or 572+ degrees Farenheit).

      I suspect that these ci

      • You can actually boil water in a paper bag, using a butane/propane blowtorch. The water inside the bag keeps the temperature on the inside surface below 100 degrees. As long as the paper is thin enough, the outer surface temperature will still be low enough for the paper not to go on fire. But practice this {and do it out of doors, naturally} before showing it off to your mates, because a paper bag full of water is a fragile thing and the first few times you try this stunt, you probably will burst the

  • Paper Cells Phones? (Score:5, Informative)

    by thynk ( 653762 ) <slashdot AT thynk DOT us> on Monday October 27, 2003 @04:50AM (#7317560) Homepage Journal
    A few years back, didn't the same company promise us paper cell phone and laptops that were disposable and going to come in happy meals? Or was that someone else?

    • Yeah! (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Yeah, I think your right. I remember something about that.

      I remember these babies [youngmoney.com] from a few years back. Here [com.com] is another.
      • Thanks for the ground work AC. Looks like Hop-on [hop-on.com] is actually making a go of it and has actual product on some of the shelves. News stories from this year even! Also look like DTC Products (the orignal link I was thinking of has given up the ghost. [dtcproducts.com]

        I for one wouldn't mind having an ultra cheap paper cell phone that I could keep in the car, and maybe one for the kids to keep in their backpacks for emergencies. At prices between $5 and $40, even the working class can get these. Cell phones in happy mea
        • I'm not sure Cell phones is a good product category. They're already cheap.

          They are potentially scamming the public or investors with this product (it may not be as cheap as they claim). At any rate, they are finding difficulties with an ambitious marketing plan. It would seem like a good fit to partner with an existing carrier rather than try to make these impulse items. I wonder if the product fizzled because the talk plans were too expensive, compared to prepaid plans, or other phone company package
  • This is great. You can design 3D circuits and print them on your good ole Bubble jet refilled with conductive ink. Stack a few sheets together and really have something to play with.

    If you are printing on Fabric, then you can get interactive clothing, that does all sorts of stupid stuff when you move. In Tokyo they'd sell like Hotcakes!

    • Insofar as bubblejet circut printing goes, the circuts would have to be huge to account for the drift in the paper feed mechanisms...
      • Why would drift be a problem? As long as things match up on a small scale, everything should work fine.
  • I made printed circuits almost 20 years ago by drawing patterns with a lead (graphite) pencil. I made a resister network for a static charge meter this way. It used a calculator LCD display as a bar graph. India ink (carbon black in water with a little gum arabica) is also conductive and can be used to draw circuits. I've also had to threaten an engineer that was writing comments on prototype circuit boards. The ink from his marker was weakly conductive and making intermittant glitches. I hadn't thought about this in a long time - may be time to dust off some of those old circuit designs and re-create them on a paper circuit board with surface-mount components and conductive ink. There are plenty of conductive glues (and home brew compounds) that could be used as "solder". With appropriate insulating glues one could even do multi-layer "boards".

  • Throwback? (Score:4, Informative)

    by Jason1729 ( 561790 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @05:04AM (#7317594)
    It's called a "printed circuit board" because it was originally made by printing the metal on a substrate. The process of etching the copper clad boards was a later innovation, but the name stuck.

    Jason
    ProfQuotes [profquotes.com]

  • Ohhh (Score:5, Funny)

    by jabbadabbadoo ( 599681 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @05:05AM (#7317601)
    Heard in the office:

    "Ohhh, fuck, I shreded my computer!"

  • Trivial? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by anethema ( 99553 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @05:22AM (#7317636) Homepage
    Depends, if its something you could just pop into your inkjet and print out a circuit, I dont see how thats trivial at all. On the other hand, if its some $10k printer..then BAH to them!
    Maybe i'll RTFA :D

  • Obligatory Altered Simpsons Reference (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Barney: Circuits! Circuits everywhere!
    Moe (?): You gettin' ready for Ciruits Day, Barney?
    Barney: Circuits Day? What's Circuits Day?
  • On my linux box, both mozilla and konqueror hang while opening the article http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20031026_712.html.

    Does the article open in windows IE?

  • a point missed and a point made (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 27, 2003 @06:09AM (#7317716)
    Whilst everyone is all like 'omg I had a conductive pen when i was in grade school', we should probably point out that, this is not the same thing. Your conductive ink pen from radio shack, or your lead pencil, whilst worked great for your 'my 1st polarity tester' circuit are not fantastic materials for modern circuits.
    The old etching process that is common place now for PCB fabrication has to be totally monitored, controlled and QA'ed to death to achieve the results required by modern PCB designs.

    Paper PCBs aren't really hot news anymore, the ink and company have been pedaling this idea for a whiles now. But you have to see the good sides, for one thing no matter how clean a PCB shop is, they make a hell of alot of bad chemicals worse during the process. If the acid baths, solder lines and the hell on earth glue they use get obsoleted it won't be soon enough.

    That all said, and rather off topic, I think we are seeing less and less PCB design happening these days. FPGAs have come of age and now offer gate counts high enough to make them useful for more than a just bunch of glue logic in a single package. Look out for new PCBs where all the complex and exciting stuff is packed away in a single little chip with only a half dozen supporting components and headphone socket attached to that paper PCB ;)

  • This ink as it stands can't carry enough current to be useful for much butlow power toys. It's an old idea seeing some new use. Futher work will make it more useful but it needs some big break throughs. My conductive pen ( a real conductor that could handle some current )is a life saver.

  • Happy Meals (Score:3, Informative)

    by 876 ( 115861 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @06:34AM (#7317760)
    In Australia, McDonald's produced Finding Nemo themed Happy Meal boxes which came with a toy plastic fish. When the fish was placed on some bubbles on the top of the box and the user touched the bubbles on the side (which connected to the top ones), the fish made noises and/or lit up (I believe it depended which character you got). This used T-ink - AFAIK it's the first time it's been used in Australia. Has anyone else seen it being used for similar purposes?
  • Flint Ink, which has 5,000 employees, has set up a unit to develop methods of cheaply printing antennas for radio-frequency identification tags, the tiny chips that retailers are hoping will replace bar codes.

    So in the future, as my newspaper is sending my bio-information back to the publisher to be re-sold in a database to a third pary - bio-information that it has "read" by me handling the conductive print and interrupting the magnetic field (thus being able to track my pulse etc), will I be able to hac
  • Mmmm.. Accella..

    I feel.. acellerated

  • Progress (Score:2, Insightful)

    by value_added ( 719364 )
    Given the prevalence of flashing banner ads on the web, there's an unescapable irony in reading "Our goal is a total print medium where your paper is going to talk." followed by the comment "For now, the technology is available in limited form and in somewhat trivial applications."

    So instead of a medium that could take on the form of a PBS documentary, or have the ability to listen to a Peter Jennings voice narrate the text while we're having coffee, we're going to get something more resembling the Fox New

  • Handheld games in trading card packs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bigattichouse ( 527527 ) on Monday October 27, 2003 @09:01AM (#7318118) Homepage
    Combine T-ink with E-ink and you have a playing card that is like a little nintendo... Or Better yet, all those trading card games could REALLY interact with a "player".. so you lay down your cards and they literally store hitpoints and such, or special moves/rules/ etc.
  • As an electrical engineer hobbiest this is very intruiging. If I can just print a test ciruit board and keep trying new modles and 'debugging' I'd save a lot, assuming that the ink cost is low enough.
    • Well, yeah, it'd be nice for prototyping, but really what's wrong with a protoboard or even some sort of simulation software? In reality, you're going to want to do this more quickly than soldering to a prototype board every time, right?
  • A lot of people discussing the benefits/drawbacks of circuits on paper. I am just wondering though, would it not be possible to print to thin paper-like substances, but something not made from pulped-dead-tree. Are there any plasticy substances you can print to? I know that inkjets used to be friendly to some forms of overhead-projector sheets (the transparent ones), how about lasers?

    Would any of these make a better medium for circuits?

    Oh, and I think this would be even more useful on a photocopier. Jus
  • i-candy, of course.
  • I'm not one to cry over things like this, but it's happening with surprising regularity these days. What follows is pathetic wallowing in my own tears. I'm just going to blurt out all my ideas so I can do a "see, I said it back then". I claim no originality in these ideas, as it's obvious many people come up with them independently. In the open-source spirit of things, anyone should feel free to use these ideas.

    1) City as canvas. Some of the first talk of digital paper got me thinking about it. I figur
  • What are you doing dave? I'm not a cake, Dave, you shouldn't serve me up at the party. Daaaavey, daaaaaaaaaaaavey, da a a a a aaaaav eeeeeyyy. daaaaaaa.....
  • I see some interesting potential for this, perhaps this technology would come in handy with bills and checks?

  • I think the uses for this stops when you're thinking of building anything large out of it, simply because of the clumsiness of paper (and the obviously incineration ;) )

    Stops? But think of how easily Mr. Bond can dispose of his top secret weapons control circuits in the case of a security breach!

    Seriously, though... the espianage implications (both corporate and governmental) are staggering. What about secure encrypted data storage? Keep sensitive data in a medium that can be destroyed beyond any

  • I really do. At it's heart, geekery is about playing. And playing requires toys.

    There's the poster radio [hasbro.com] with real working controls just printed on the poster. It's over an inch thick though, not a real poster. Oh, and there's a poster phone [hasbro.com] as well.

    Here's an inflatable radio [grand.com]. How is it different from other inflatable radios [treats4chicks.co.uk]? Mainly that the controls are printed right on the inflatable surface.

    And here's some more boring toys [grand.com] which use the T-Ink technology.

    Actually, I'm sort of surprised ThinkGeek h

  • In the spirit of the season, this'll really help when I forget to take the wrapper off my candy and gum!

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