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Technology

Paper-thin Integrated Circuits 44

Posted by CmdrTaco from the thin-is-good dept.
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. "
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Paper-thin Integrated Circuits More

Paper-thin Integrated Circuits

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  • 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?

    Things can't really get much smaller than this ... or can they?
  • 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]

  • 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)

  • 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.

  • Curved surfaces, MEMS, etc... (Score:3)

    by Tekmage ( 17375 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @04:50AM (#1868699) Homepage
    Personally, I prefer the ball semiconductor [ballsemi.com] approach for microelectronics on curved surfaces. :-)

    Or for antenna-type structures, go for EFAB [isi.edu].

    ...and then there's that micro [aip.org]phone reported [supersite.net] a while back.
  • This stuff is not new. It's quite a few years old, in fact.
  • Dr. F is no longer thinking OR getting even. He is gone, and so is Frank, and so is Joel...
    (sniffle...)
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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 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

  • Bendy circuits (Score:3)

    by EnglishTim ( 9662 ) on Thursday June 03, 1999 @04:48AM (#1868713)
    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.
  • 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.

    Surely you mean "revolting", not "neat"!

  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Check this out!

    TIRIS [ti.com]

    something Texas Instruments is working on
  • Single-chip TCP/IP stacks [techweb.com] aren't far off, and I was at a workshop [www.ocri.ca] 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 [chipworks.com] the industry. :-)
  • 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...
  • "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"

  • 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 [bluetooth.com] called Bluetooth. The Bluetooth tranciever technology will be very cheap and low in power [eetimes.com] 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) [zdnet.co.uk] 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 [bluetooth.com] and the ZDnet UK Bluetooth Special Report [zdnet.co.uk].
  • Hmmm Yes, yesyesyes, this seems to go along VERY nicely with electronic ink. Can you imagine a palmpilot thin as paper? You could even fold it, so it's letter sized or half of letter sized, just a matter of what you need.

    Oh damn, I should write 3com.

  • 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.
  • Lick your stamps well; it will short out the leads.

  • Roughly.

    The smartmedia interface uses fewer IO lines, and the case is designed for compactness. It's designed as an addressed sequential storage/retreival system with a relatively simple software interface.

    The CompactFlash interface is roughly equivalent to a PCMCIA mechanically, and is 98% compatible eletrically. CompactFlash is designed to be ATA drive compatible, and as such is software driver compatible with drives in the PCMCIA cartridges, but much more complex than SmartMedia. To interface a Compact Flash card to a laptop with PCMCIA interface only requires a simple mechanical converter to connect the pins from one to the other in the right order.

  • 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..."

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