6 ms·
Printed Electronics (2016)
- Animats 9y agoThe application seems to be cheaper RFID tags.
- devrandomguy 9y ago> Ideal for simple indicator displays Looks to me like just about any low frequency, low power circuit is a possibility.
- Animats 9y agoLow density, too. Not for rolling out flash memory by the mile.
- swampthinker 9y agoIf this is cheaper than RFID tags, I'm seriously considering starting a company around selling a fridge device that could keep track of food that had a tag printed on them. The Jetsons fridge that has always been promised, but never made. A fridge that could buy your food for you!
- Udik 9y agoI think it was never made because it's useless. I know perfectly what's in my fridge. The problem is in deciding what's still edible and then maybe go for some grocery shopping.
- runeks 9y ago> Xerox opening 1.3Billion unit plant in early 2016 Sounds like the site needs an update.
- agumonkey 9y ago"printed memory needs a refresh"
- TeMPOraL 9y ago"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a human face booting on a stamp forever." (https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/17/the-moral-of-the-story/ https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/10/17/the-moral-of-the-story..., CTRL+f for "By 2050")
- agumonkey 9y agoheh good one.
- ChefDenominator 9y ago"CTRL+f" - you sound like a Chrome loser. (o;
- TeMPOraL 9y agoI almost wrote C-s, but decided against it for the sake of people here who are not fluent in Emacs-speak. Also, don't Firefox, Opera and IE use CTRL+f as well?
- agumonkey 9y agowhy settle on GUI idioms when you can / ;)
- ChefDenominator 9y agoFirefox has an option to search text when you start typing.
- amelius 9y agoWhat is the pitch of this technology?
- Neeek 9y agoReading the sample use cases on the site makes it seem like smarter DRM is the pitch :(
- devrandomguy 9y agoI'm guessing about 300 dpi.
- leggomylibro 9y agoHuh. The site isn't completely clear; could this sort of technology cheaply print custom silicon layers, like ICs and some types of components? If so, that would be amazing. If I could print a to-spec FET, a 555 die, some BJTs, a handful of film resistors to +/- 1%... Well baby, you got yourself a stew!
- Sanddancer 9y agoI'm thinking so, given they say that they can print displays and memory. That suggests that they can do a pretty decent number of semiconductors, which indeed could be rather useful.
- TD-Linux 9y agoMost "printed" electronics mean either organic semiconductors, which generally have poor performance but are very cheap to print and flexible. This company also offers polysilicon, which is generally more expensive but is higher performance - it's used for TFT displays, for example. Both of these are usually patterned, so it's more for volume production that one-off like 3d printing. I am not actually sure what the benefits of sheet-based logic are - RFID is obvious, but existing vendors prefer tiny, inflexible monocrystalline silicon dies instead. Are the Thinfilm RFID tags cheaper?
- rwmj 9y agoARM demoed some printed SoCs (based on Cortex M0) a while back: https://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed-plastic-chips/ https://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed-... The process is described here: http://www.molecularimprints.com/technology-overview/j-fil-overview http://www.molecularimprints.com/technology-overview/j-fil-o...
- devrandomguy 9y agoImagine if this technology was available as inkjet cartridges. The potential for decentralization of electronics manufacturing, is staggering. So is the potential of electronics at the price of fancy photo paper. We would finally be in a position to begin replicating the open source software revolution, in electronics. The power of the hardware manufacturing giants would melt away. High performance, nanometer-scale silicon would obviously still have to be manufactured the classic way, because, nanometers. But, instead of buying a precious tablet, you order a ribbon of of peel & stick wafers, of commodity CPU and RAM chips. You then stick them onto a printed, flexible nv-mem + screen to enable it to compute at modern speeds. As people get used to disposable, custom electronics, they learn that for most of what they do with a single sheet of "paper", they actually need very little computing power. Rugged, cheap, micrometer-scale CPUs make a comeback. Kids study them in grade school, using an ordinary optical microscope. IC designers start to optimize for readability. The general public begins to take responsibility for their hardware and software stack, the way they take responsibility for their vehicle and their home. /dream
- dreamer2 9y agoHey! Whatever your job is, I like the way you think(tm) and would like to have people like you in the team! If you could use a free pool of computing resources and want to start building something that would actually make the world a better place(not-for-profit, no cheap, outsourced r&d labor === VC* targeted sell-your-soul project) - send me an email!
- sleepychu 9y agoI can't tell if this is a joke or not (ambiguous X,Y,Z === A), but you don't have an email address if you're really looking for them to send you one.
- dreamer2 9y agoOK, I may have used a comma instead of a semicolon(read "X; Y,Z).. also, I'm not an active yc contributor in terms of posts/comments - thought my email address would be visible, thanks for pointing that out. I'm also not really good at getting my point across :) and I'm only able to "sell" things I believe in and even then it takes some time - see my previous point - anyway, no joke, just clumsiness.
- ChuckMcM 9y agoWow, this is pretty much 90% of the value of the old Plastic Logic business (are these guys related?) Sad that they are spinning it as a physical products DRM although I certainly understand how that it is unique there. Cheap challenge/response authentication that even if you have all the materials and the printer you can't duplicate without the crypto secrets. Its a much better gizmo that a hologram sticker. That said, I'd love to see them add OLEDs so that you can print a 'picture' and drop it on a table and have it light up. The signage options there would be pretty awesome too.
- Kliment 9y agoFucking terrible that what they considered the number one item to mention on that page is how many patents they hold, rather than what the thing is, does, or is good for.
- desdiv 9y agoIt's a form of signaling[0]. In this case, it means: "Like you what you see here? Well unfortunately we can't sell it to you since we don't have the manufacturing capacity. So you'll have to license our IP so you can build it yourself." Case in point, Xerox licensed their IP and is already putting units in the field[1]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics) [1] http://www.packagingdigest.com/brand-protection/smart-label-with-memory-strengthens-pkg-authentication1606 http://www.packagingdigest.com/brand-protection/smart-label-...
- scientific_ass 9y agoSomeone once said "Patents have become a kind of currency now". It's sad to see that people are scaling innovation using only patents.
- em3rgent0rdr 9y ago50+ ways to ensure this won't be adopted universally until patents expire. 50+ ways to hold back innovation.
- bborud 9y agoTo be honest: they have been around for 20 years and haven't really done anything yet. I don't think they will. I think they want to sell their patents to a troll.
- PinguTS 9y agoThere are other companies in this field too. Right next town here is PolyIC who does printed circuits for years for use as touch buttons, printed RfID, and alike. http://www.polyic.com/ http://www.polyic.com/
- tiredwired 9y agoNew chip fab in San Jose, CA: http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/08/san-jose-gets-new-potentially-revolutionary-chip-fab/ http://www.mercurynews.com/2017/05/08/san-jose-gets-new-pote...
- Leynos 9y agoFor those in the know, how does the cost of 12-15¢ for an NFC chip compare with what a packaging company would pay now?
- sgt 9y agoSo how far we from being able to use this technology on a prototype basis and quickly (and cheaply) print electronics at home or at the office?
- Leynos 9y agoHere are details (from 2015) of the collaboration with Xerox mentioned on the Thinfilm page: https://venturebeat.com/2015/01/21/thinfilm-teams-with-xerox-so-it-can-print-a-billion-chips-a-year-for-the-internet-of-things/ https://venturebeat.com/2015/01/21/thinfilm-teams-with-xerox... They describe being able to print memory, with logic planned in the future. They also talk about commercializing and scaling the process. Rights management for physical goods seems to be the most commonly touted usecase for this. Another example usecase I have heard mentioned is a thermometer and an indicator that changes colour to indicate spoilage that can be printed into the label of temperature sensitive goods.
- jlebrech 9y agonow if the top layer could be a display and the other 6 layers are the rest of the computer. I'd create a cube of all those sandwiched together.
- pmoriarty 9y agoI'm not sure how practical this would be, due to parasitic capacitance.[1] [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_capacitance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitic_capacitance
- Mtinie 9y agoTo mitigate against the concern of parasitic capacitance raised by @pmoriarty, I would decouple the display layer from the computational layer using a shielding substrate. You could get a very similar effect to what you're proposing if you used a future-version of a flexible OLED screen like the ones that LG[1] (and others) are beginning to produce. It's not exactly the case (yet) where you could fabricate it at home with your super cool electronics inject printer. It is, however, definitely a step in the right direction for giving enterprising people the ability to create open-source and bespoke tablets, phones, and other media devices that previously were only within the reach of very well-funded companies. --- [1] http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/business/2015/05/19/80/0501000000AEN20150519006000320F.html http://english.yonhapnews.co.kr/business/2015/05/19/80/05010...
- khoury 9y agotest
- ChefDenominator 9y agoTPM? Standard critique of TPM includes pointing out that manufacture is a black box of trust. The ability to completely control both software and hardware seems like it would make this scheme more desirable.
- tmaly 9y agoIt must be too early, but I am failing to see the major benefits here. Is it cheaper and more durable?
- astrodust 9y agoIf you can "print" circuits instead of having to image them one wafer at a time that could be a big throughput boost. My guess is they can't do 10nm or anything competitive with it yet, so it's only suitable for displays and such.