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Start the Presses: Printable Circuits Nearly Ready 101

Posted by timothy from the roll-'em dept.
akookieone writes: "MIT Tech Review has an article on Rolltronics (first appearing in /. a year ago). Seems they can now print circuits 10 micrometers across, and are thinking they could 'very shortly' move from R&D to production."
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Start the Presses: Printable Circuits Nearly Ready More

Start the Presses: Printable Circuits Nearly Ready

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  • WOW (Score:1, Insightful)

    by sofar ( 317980 )
    This will really give development a big boost, as custom circuitry will be available for lower costs. Imagine developing your own processor and having it printed too!

    oh shoot, it has a paper jam error...

    • Re:WOW (Score:2, Informative)

      by minard ( 264043 )
      This actually isn't going to be any use for processors, and it won't necessarily work for small runs either. But it is a very cool technology for different reasons, and the article does explain this.

      Look at it this way - CPUs have become much cheaper over time because manufacturing processes have been developed to reduce the size of each transistor, allowing you to fit more on a wafer of a given size, whilst increasing the size of the wafers - and the cost per wafer has not increased at the same exponential rate as the transistor count per wafer. Since it is ok that the transistors are smaller, this is a good thing. However, this model doesn't work for things where you actually want the device to be big - like a flat panel display or (as the article says) an X-Ray panel (think detector in an airport that you walk through).

      What this technology does is provides a compelling economic model for large items that isn't served by conventional manufacturing processes.

      One more thing - this uses amorphous silicon, also a good thing for large items in that the absence of the need for crystallinity is a big help for yield - but at the same time don't expect it to break any speed records.

      Bottom line - this is a really cool technology, but it isn't going to be used for one-off roll-your-own CPUs.

      • This actually isn't going to be any use for processors, and it won't necessarily work for small runs either. But it is a very cool technology for different reasons, and the article does explain this.

        For big, cycle-sucking applications, maybe. However, I could see this being quite useful as a means for hobbists to create their own PDAs or other microcontroler devices (it could be a boon for robot fighting, being able to pre-program certain moves, etc.)

        OK, so there are already things like the BASIC Stamp to do this, and while I can't imagine plastic microcontrolers being cheeper (overall) than a BASIC Stamp, it would still be fun to play with the circutry on your own.

        • agreed that you could run a low-performance CPU on this. By the way, it would be very low performance - we're talking 10um process on amorphous silicon. If your're thinking of getting something in the league of, say, a 6502, forget it. This isn't going to get close.

          That might be good enough (and certainly fun) for sure. However, you still have the problem of low runs - I don't see anything in the description of this process that says it can do that. Just because it's "printing" doesn't mean that there aren't large tooling costs, and I suspect (but can't verify) that there might be.

          • Just because it's "printing" doesn't mean that there aren't large tooling costs, and I suspect (but can't verify) that there might be.

            I've been wondering about tooling costs, too. Every article I read says " . . . printed with technology similar to inkjet printers." That "similar" word makes me worry. Apparently one group at MIT did use an actual inkjet, though. You'd still need special ink and paper, which could get pricy. Also, the kinds of size of the paths would be dependent on how good your printer is; an old printer that tends to smear even standard images and text just won't cut it.

  • Watch, as I wear a circuit board.
    And verily, those little LED's that are flashing are part of a binary adder.
    It's one up on a T-Shirt with perl code or Pi on it :)

  • Interesting stuff .... I feel his geek pride (Score:3, Funny)

    by lcorc79 ( 549464 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:36AM (#2841069) Homepage
    He proudly unpacks the company's demo unit: ......

    Ok, so the demo is lame. I can just see his big dorky grin as he gets all excited about his little blinking LED. Reminds me of my past ... science fairs, etc. -- and gives me a frightening glimpse into my future. *sigh* I think I need to get out more.

    Anyway, this does sound cool .. the reduction of costs for things like LCD panels could make a lof our cool dream gadgets become an affordable reality ... I just hope the economy doesn't end up killing this research ..

  • Goodbye acid etch, a whole new generation comin (Score:4, Insightful)

    by t0qer ( 230538 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:36AM (#2841070) Homepage Journal
    Ahh the things I wont miss,

    burnt hands
    bad odor
    ciruits that just didn't etch correctly.

    I can't recall how many times i've seen a really cool project in popular electronics and being hesitant to build it because its such a pain in the ass etching a board from the magazine or too cheap to order the kit.

    Home printable etching has some very cool implications for the hobbyist or beginner electronics person. Kudo's to the ppl that invented this.
    • Ahh the things I wont miss,
      burnt hands
      bad odor
      ciruits that just didn't etch correctly.

      You forgot the endless thrills of:

      • mucking out the etching tank,
      • convincing dad that I should be allowed to bring powerful acids into the house
      • trying to draw with those stupid 'resist' pens...
      • Just in case anyone didn't notice, a resist pen is also known as a 'Sharpie'. Just draw your circuit on the copper with a standard sharpie, and make sure its nice and opaque. Protect any large areas with a quick coat of fingernail polish, and etch in nice hot etchant. It ain't pretty, but its effective.
    • Better than home printable etching. When the magazine includes a kit that requires a board they can just include the board!!!!

      You supply some soldering, a few chips to drive some things and a case and viola, instant techno-geek-thingy.
  • ...each with its own clever phrase for that day. I wonder how long it will be before someone offers a "full-service" laundromat with T-shirts made of this material. Take your T-shirts to the cleaners, and get them back with a fresh supply of clever phrases for the next month. Of course the upload mechanism will be encrypted so you have to go back to get another batch of fresh clever phrases. This could give a hi-tech twist to the old saying..."no ticket, no laundry".

  • XEROX (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Can I copy ur circuit in the xerox machine out there ? 10 cents a copy, will honor your copyrights.
  • This is New?

    Hm. I guess it is. But doesn't it have that sheen of, "Why the heck wasn't somebody making these things ten years ago?"

    I mean, they have those traces-printed-on-plastic ribbon cables connecting things like keyboards and calculator screens to components. And printer heads in inkjets.

    Plus, we have alloys which can be deposited on substrates a micron-layer at a time. How tough is it to dope conducting inks with Gallium-Arsenide? (Or whatever).

    Why the heck hasn't this technology been around for a decade or more? It doesn't seem so much like an advance as it does a, "They finally got off their asses and assembled the stupid thing."


    -Fantastic Lad

    • I mean, they have those traces-printed-on-plastic ribbon cables connecting things like keyboards and calculator screens to components. And printer heads in inkjets.

      Flex's are made using a similar process to that used to make printed circuit board. A layer of copper is stuck to a sheet of plastic and then photo etched. This is cheap but not as cheap as a normal printing process.

      Plus, we have alloys which can be deposited on substrates a micron-layer at a time.

      This can be done (crisp packets for example (sorry - chip packets for you yanks)) but most processes require high temperatures which don't do much good to a layer of plastic.

      How tough is it to dope conducting inks with Gallium-Arsenide? (Or whatever).

      Physics Today have an article about the University of Cambridge [physicstoday.org] printing transistors using ink jet printers. Conducting inks are not unusual - indeed most mass produced PCBs are put together with screen printed solder paste. Its a bit of a step to call this an ink but it gives you an idea of what's possible.

      Why the heck hasn't this technology been around for a decade or more? It doesn't seem so much like an advance as it does a, "They finally got off their asses and assembled the stupid thing."

      The devel is in the detail. Sure I can demonstrate printing to you using some chimney soot and half a potato. Its quite a bit harder to produce a 100,000 copies of a newspaper (including those AOL CD's) for just a few pence. Development always takes many times longer than you think and far more money.

      • The devel is in the detail. Sure I can demonstrate printing to you using some chimney soot and half a potato. Its quite a bit harder to produce a 100,000 copies of a newspaper (including those AOL CD's) for just a few pence.


        LOL! I like that! "Spuds and soot." Nice one!


        -Fantastic Lad

        • and then of course, the guy that thinks of the spuds and soot printing technique applies and gets a patent on the process. If he's clever, it will worded so that it then covers all future printing processes such a proper ink and proper type.

          This would be fine if he continues to innovate but if he does not, nobody else will think the costs are worth it as they will just get sued.

          The other side of course, is that if there were no patents then nobody would innovate as they would not be able to recoup their investment. I personally think that although this is true, there tide has flowed far to far towards the patent holders. I would love to see the strength of patents weakened but I feel the opposite is happening.

  • Practical / Profit making application (Score:4, Interesting)

    by caferace ( 442 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:41AM (#2841084) Homepage
    Picture this, if you will. You are looking for, or even better have a design you can use immediately.

    You pull up a website, specify an existing (or upload your .cad file) and you get your IC board in a day or two in the mail. Sign me up...

  • This work was brought to you by the country US and the letters P, T, and O.
  • So i guess this is what the doc ordered for the consumer electronics industry. Cheaper, easier fab plants for all those nice'n cute gadgets..but as far as the high density chips go clearly the old etching is here to stay.

    But why on earth is Intel (and AMD..) sitting on top of this huge oppurtunity and doing nothing about it ?

    • Innovators Dilemma is a book that might explain why Intel and AMD might not be able to touch it with a barge pole, even if they wanted to.

      Chipzilla and it's sibling are already deeply invested and focused on a capital-intensive model of production. Roll-Tronics and it's ilk are a completely different model, and market segment. It would cost intel or amd even more than a startup to become proficient at this type of production because it runs counter to all of the companies carefully built up knowledge and experience. And for the forseeable future it won't be profitable for them to do so.

      Bold Predictions

      • Rolltronics will have licensing deals with 3M and Rubbermaid
      • this technology will be a key part of ubiquitous computing, but you'll hardly notice it.
        • possible products:
        • wall coverings with network addressable display screens
        • cheaper embedded sensors in things from shoes to skyscrapers
        • Yet still even more disposable smart toys

  • robustness (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nzhavok ( 254960 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:49AM (#2841098) Homepage
    I admit being able to print your own circuits would be pretty cool for the amateur hobbyist, or even the security conscious -- cheap electronic one-time-pads for example. But I guess it'll be out of my price line for a while yet.

    I'm wondering how robust these circuits are going to be, i.e. how long are they going to last and how sensitive they have to be handled. Couldn't seem to find this info in the article.

    • Re:robustness (Score:2, Informative)

      by caferace ( 442 )
      I'm wondering how robust these circuits are going to be, i.e. how long are they going to last and how sensitive they have to be handled. Couldn't seem to find this info in the article.

      Dig deeper... [iowathinfilm.com]

      They sound robust enough for some practical applications. Remember, it's always your responsibility as the end-user to make things work. :)

  • Has a whole new meaning now.

  • Digital T-Shirts? (Score:2, Troll)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I just can't imagine a Beowulf wardrobe of these things!

  • The next step (Score:5, Interesting)

    by mgv ( 198488 ) <Nospam.01.slash2dotNO@SPAMveltman.org> on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @06:57AM (#2841115) Homepage Journal
    This sort of technology could have a myriad of uses.

    For example:

    I can just see how Steve Jobs (who loves form with function) could use this type of technology to get away from the beige box a step further. You could print out the computer on the back of the screen, or into the monitor stand. Then again, he has almost done that with the new iMac's anyway.

    PDA's could get alot smaller.

    Also, it (presumably) gets away from alot of issues with size of circuits. Traditional intergrated circuits benefit from small size as they have not only use lower voltages and operate faster, but also have a lower likely hood of defects. Each silicon wafer may have a few pinpoint defects, but each one takes out the whole chip. Smaller chips mean a smaller percentage loss rate.

    Presumably this technology is resistant to such faults (or it would be pretty useless at the sizes of sheets of newspaper). This could mean very large integrated circuits without the need for circuit boards as such. In other words, shrinking a whole motherboard down to a large integrated circuit.

    While the current technology is still at a 10 micron stage, it could still have benefit if applied to the idea of printing a whole computer rather than just printing a CPU and soldering it in.

    Also, I would presume that this is first generation technology, and should reduce below 10 microns fairly easily.

    Just a thought or two.

    Michael

    • Re:The next step (Score:3, Informative)

      by Alsee ( 515537 )
      printing a whole computer rather than just printing a CPU and soldering it in.

      Nope, wrong application. The article says:
      "these electronics are not designed for devices that require high density, like memory chips or microprocessors."

      Compared to silicon chips this technology is big and slow.

      The good news is that aside from computers, most uses for circutry don't require ultra-high transistor density or ultra-high processing speed.

      -

  • Cool technology (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hattig ( 47930 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @07:10AM (#2841143) Journal
    This is great for all those applications that don't care about GHz level speeds (or even speeds in the MHz really) or small size transistors. Like TFTs, OLEDs, etc, or low power computing.

    And great for people who want to play with circuits, but don't have a way to fab their own chips. Which is pretty much all of us. We can now go along and make our own Z80 and 6502 derivatives running at a slower speed then the original, but very light and plasticy. Sounds like great fun.

    Probably good for verification of electronic circuits - being slow, you can monitor things very easily. Being large you can see the circuit and attach probes easily. Being cheap you can do this in a small business should this technology make it into cheap units (cheap being in the 10's of thousands of pounds printing onto 3" wide rolls of plastic). Maybe in a few years anyway.

    I wonder if they will ever get the printing down to the micron level, or below, given time? Would be hard I imagine, but imagine a 50MHz stamp... what the purpose would be I don't know, but where theres a technology, theres a product...

    • Re:Cool technology (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From the Rolltronics website:

      "Until now, the feature size of electronic components made using web processing has been in the vicinity of 50 microns and larger (1 micron = one millionth of a meter). Rolltronics is taking the feature size of its electronic components down to a much smaller dimension. "Fine-featured" as used by Rolltronics refers to component features ranging in size from approximately 0.5 to 100 microns."

    • Re:Cool technology (Score:5, Funny)

      by Rentar ( 168939 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @07:33AM (#2841187)
      And great for people who want to play with circuits, but don't have a way to fab their own chips. Which is pretty much all of us. We can now go along and make our own Z80 and 6502 derivatives running at a slower speed then the original, but very light and plasticy. Sounds like great fun.

      I don't know which fact I should find more alerting:

      • That I read a site where ppl post such things
      • That I understand what you are saying
      • That I agree on the "Sounds like great fun."-part.
    • Don't forget about clockless computing...

      too lazy to parse html:
      http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/14/1850 23 9&mode=flat

    • Re:Cool technology (Score:2, Interesting)

      by stuffman64 ( 208233 )
      Well, 50MHz stamps do exist [parallaxinc.com]. I own three, and you can do all kinds of nerdy stuff with it, like make an RGB LED harddrive light or a maze-navigating robot (like I do with mine).

      Oh wait.... you meant postage stamps, not Basic Stamps...
      • That is a cool device actually, I must concur.

        Basically, a tiny PCB with mounted chips itself given pins. Neat. Just the kind of thing that this printed circuit board will be able to replace I imagine. Or you could make your robot controller in hardware.

        Depends on how well RAM and ROM can be implemented using this printing technology, and how much per cm^2 to be precise...

    • mmmm...atari pants

  • Whats happening with semiconducting ink's? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @07:27AM (#2841172)
    This is nice and all, but it doesnt seem to give a viable path to high performance circuits.

    MIT's semiconducting inks and submicron printing technology seemed a lot more interesting, combined with the rapidly upcoming technologies for localized recrystallization of amorphous silicon into large grain poly-silicon this should get us very near to the quality produced with litography (grains can be made larger than the transistors you will be using, so for all extents and purposes its just as good as crystalline silicon). Unfortunately its gone very quiet though, anyone know if they are still making headway?

  • Heh (Score:3, Funny)

    by bshuttleworth ( 178787 ) <bradNO@SPAMdeimos.co.za> on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @07:49AM (#2841213) Homepage
    Forget having a T-Shirt with the DeCSS code on it, plug a DVD into one sleave and the Computer into the other ... =p
    • You laugh, but think about it for a minute.

      On the one hand we have DRM tech being moved out of software and into hardware because software hacks can be easily distributed (download a script) but hardware hacks are difficult. You can distribute instructions, but it's still more than most people can manage to break out the soldering iron.

      Now in a few years time we'll have downloadable hardware hacks. This is heavy duty shit. The implications are enormous. The ability to print out any circuit possible with 70's vintage tech could be nothing short of revolutionary -- we did some crazy shit in the 70's.

      Imagine that instead of having to mail-order a Macrovision stripping box, or even a kit, from someone in the Loompanix catalog, your anarchy-minded non-hardware-guy could download the .cad from someone on Usenet and print it out, bend some connector pins into place and hook up the cables. Imagine what else we could do.

      Even if the printers are expensive, they'll still get loose. University salvage, highly-paid bachelor geeks. Hell, when CD burners were $3000, I knew people who had them. My buddy Rog does design consulting, makes a killing, and spends it on cool hardware. He's had a smartcard writer for years, and he can download DirecTV access codes, and burn cards for himself and his friends. Imagine if he could print out ICs...

      Really, this is going to be very interesting to watch.
  • I can't wait for the day when we can all print out our own computers. This might be the first step towards Open Source hardware!

    This is just another great example of the technology market giving us all more personal freedom. The big hardware companies might not like it, but I'm sure that this is the beginning of the end for them, just like Linux was the beginning of the end for MicroSoft

  • Heck! should name it Geek Wallpaper! (Score:3, Funny)

    by itsnotme ( 20905 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @07:57AM (#2841225) Homepage
    Heck.. now you can go to a wallpaper store and say.. I want the geek wallpaper and they'll probably pull out a coupla rolls of this for ya to use! and heck it'll even do SOMETHING too!

    Moderation points: Funny: +1

  • Palmtop applications (Score:3, Interesting)

    by nurightshu ( 517038 ) <rightshu@cox.net> on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @08:26AM (#2841275) Homepage Journal

    This sort of thin-film circuitry would be great for palmtop computing -- the reduction in Batman factor alone would be worth it.

    I've been praying for something like this to come along since I was in the military, and we had rules about exactly what we could have on underneath our BDU tunics. Didn't stop most of us military geeks from carrying the cell, Palm, Leatherman, and pager, but it would still be nice to have something that doesn't ruin your uniform appearance (or the lines of your suit, if you're stuck in one of those jobs).

    Plus, the flexibility might make a great selling point. Are touch screens flexible?

  • This IMHO will be the beginning of a new golden age of hardware hacking. The last time things were somewhat like this was the age of TTL chips in "home" computers in the early to mid 80s. It was much easier to build your own peripherals, joysticks, speech synthesisers (anyone remember the 8-bit SPO256 AL2 chip sold at Radio Shack?) Building your own boards were much more common than today. Widespread use of surface mount boards and chips started to make design of your own board difficult for many hobbiests. Now it will be easy to do this again, and hardware hacking is going to take off.

    Want a new interface with your fillinblankhere, download here then print. This type of post will appear frequently on hardware sites. This will give whole new meaning to the term "Warez site" :)

    Just my 2 cents.
  • Okay, but will there be a LINUX driver for the unit?? =)
  • Assuming this technology catches on (and really works), it would be a great boon to the consumer electronics industry.

    At least initially (the first coupla decades?), however, it could cause real harm to the hobby and small run electronic apps. Imagine if all major electronic goods are "printed" at a fab, much like today's chip foundries. The economy of mass production should drive the prices of such goods way down, and that's good. Now imagine that you've got this cool idea for a little 'tronic widget that might be of interest only to yourself and a few geek fellows. You just want to make 25 or 50, even 100 of them.

    Your first obstacle is that the components needed just to build your prototype now cost about 2 to 10 times more than they used to (because discrete transistors, LED's capacitors and such are no longer mass produced). If you do get you prototype built and debugged, how can you afford to build (and who can afford to buy) your small lot of 50? It might be kinda like me trying to get UMC in Taiwan to fab me an ASIC to implement my hobby color organ or some such; they'll do it, if I can pay the 10K or 20K setup and tooling fee's and am willing to pay 2500 USD per chip.

    Maybe some day, the ubertechie might be able to buy their own PC printer, but I see the possibility that hobby electronics and small projects would suffer in the meantime.

    Almost forgot, this technology would also bring "no user servicable parts inside" to a whole new level!

    • I think there will always be a demand for all that little stuff like LEDs or discrete transistors or whatever. Even on a modern motherboard, that has a few bazilion really tiny transistors may occasionaly have a single transistor sitting off somewhere. Even big, mass-produced places will have a need to put just a few LEDs at a few specific spots (indicator lights) just like they do today. These things are not going to go away, and they will probably be massed produced for the forseeable future, no matter what new plastic-computers come along.

  • "Sauvante believes that Intel and other chip-making giants "are essentially jostling around a pie that's getting smaller and smaller, instead of going out to find the game-changing new paradigm. That's what Rolltronics represents.""

    This isn't going to change the game. CPUs and other computer chips still need to get smaller and faster. This technology is great, but in the world of power chips, it amounts to nothing!
  • investors hoping to capitalize on this announcement will be very disappointed if they purchase the stock with ticker symbol RTC (Riviera Tool Company). Rolltronics' company info web page may be misleading. The page refers to Rolltronics as RTC, which some may confuse as a ticker symbol.
  • This seems to be a good application for a replacement of the CCD used in digital cameras. CCD manufacturers have been making their features smaller and smaller, but they are running out of room.(features can't be smaller than a wavelength of light) Another problem with the small ccd is that it is hard to open the aperature enough to limit the depth of field(to purposely blur the background). Ideally I would like to see an insert that you could put into your regular old film camera so you could 'go digital' without giving up all your nice lenses and bodies. One ill fated company that tried this was http://www.imagek.com, but it was vaporware (and their site just went down)

  • Great (Score:5, Funny)

    by foo fighter ( 151863 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @12:02PM (#2842284) Homepage
    Like I don't have enough printer support headaches at work already.

    I can just imagine the calls I'll be getting from my boss now:

    "Foo Fighter, my printer is smearing my traces all over the place. Could you come by and clean it so I can finish printing my new Palm?"

    Or:

    "Foo, I was printing my PowerPoint slide show, but the headlines are blinking red instead of blue. And the line chart on page three only animates halfway, then stops. Could you get over here right away and fix this?"

    Or:

    "Those nanobots I printed and released into the fish tank to monitor polution yesterday have eaten my goldfish. Could you come up with some new nanobots to eat the bad nanobots?"

    Great. Just Great.

    • "Those nanobots I printed and released into the fish tank to monitor polution yesterday have eaten my goldfish. Could you come up with some new nanobots to eat the bad nanobots?"

      Thanks, that was great. Do you mind if I put that in my e-mail .sig file?

  • I seem to recall an episode of the Jetsons where
    Elroy had a cereal box based on a cartoon
    hero of his. The box also functioned as a TV
    so you could watch the cartoon as you were eating
    the cereal. Maybe one day they will have boxes
    with tv's printed on the back?
  • Chuck Moore must be jumping up and down with this technology. Not only can he get a stack computer on this, but this seems like it could be the ideal application for Forth.

    Even without Forth, it's going to be some very low-level code that will go into these once the technology is powerful enough to justify real programming.

    Yes, it's time to start refining those optimization skills, kids.

  • Suspicion (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Animats ( 122034 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @02:37PM (#2843565) Homepage
    I'm a little suspicious. The demo is one transistor.

    Rolltronics talks about this as a technology for fabbing memory. But their transistors are far bigger (50x) than the ones in current memory parts, so their memories will have very low density. What's the point?

    They correctly cite Ovishinsky's roll-to-roll manufacture of amorphous solar cells. That's a real product, and you can buy it. But it turned out not to be cheaper [yahoo.com] than crystalline cells. There's a niche market for flexible solar panels (they can be attached to sailboat sails), but it's not big.

    The obvious application is displays. But these people haven't fabricated their first display element yet. It's way too early to consider this a breakthrough. There have been several announcements by others concerning display fabrication by printing-like processes, and some of the others are further along. It's obvious that you'd like to fab displays with a printing-like process, but so far, nobody has been able to do it, despite quite a few tries.

    • "Rolltronics talks about this as a technology for fabbing memory"

      No they don't.

      From the article:

      "That's 50 times fatter than the finest features produced using conventional photolithography. But that's okay, since these electronics are not, designed for devices that require high density, like memory chips or microprocessors."

      Ben

  • Mass Memory (Score:3, Informative)

    by Megawatt-hour ( 9425 ) on Tuesday January 15, 2002 @02:40PM (#2843596)
    Perusing Rolltronics' web site I came across this interesting nugget:

    Multilevel Organic Solid State Memory [rolltronics.com]

    It seems you can stack up these sheets and make very dense memory out of it. Here is a quote from the article:

    "They will be available in different form factors, ranging from single sheets where minimum thickness is important to stacks which can easily be put into a product that offers a terabyte of storage in a package no bigger than a pad of paper."

    Appropriately enough, the author's name is Dr. Sheats.
  • In a few more years, it could be possible to to by a circut printing kit. It would make home PC creation alot easier and cheaper.
  • You know, I hate to be negative, but if you'll recall the /. article from a year ago, Rolltronics picked up the technology from another company that failed while trying to develop it.

    I'm afraid that, cool as we all think it would be to print out electronics (and boy would it), that printable electronics is going to show up about a week before the flying car [moller.com], if at all. Rolltronics was RSN on its product about a year ago, too.

  • 1) The SSSCA passes congress, mandating the integration of proprietary Digital Rights Management technology into all electronics sold in the US.

    2) Cheap printable circuits blossom as a way for "hardware pirates" to manufacture their own decoders without integrating said DRM.

    3) Media Cartels return to square one. Do not pass go, do not collect $200.

    So what happens to the printers then? Are they somehow going to be banned unless they can automatically produce circuits that integrate the SSSCA's DRM?

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