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Non-Traditional Chips Gaining Steam

51 points by SemiTom 9y ago

obblekk 9y ago
Can someone help me understand - is the non-traditionalness of these chips enabled by continued shrinking of transistors, or something else? Are we on a new learning curve?
- hinkley 9y ago
  From the article, it’s defining traditional chips and those built on wafers cut from crystalline silicon. Hybrids are circuits built on top of something other than these wafers. Often a flexible material (for flexible chips) or on glass (eg to build the display logic into the surface of an LCD Panel)
hinkley 9y ago
Question for the collective: As data rates in cables have gone up, designers have resorted to putting codecs into the housing at the end(s) of the cables to keep up. In some cases this has made for connectors that are only slightly smaller than those from the 90’s. Can flexible circuits switch at a high enough rate to perform these signal processing tasks? I’m imagining building the circuits into the ends of the cable itself (under the strain protector?) instead of the housing. Or do we just wait for smaller chips?
- wmf 9y ago
  resorted to putting codecs into the housing at the end(s) of the cables AFAIK that's just DisplayLink and one Apple dongle and it's more due to backward compatibility than data rates. Can flexible circuits switch at a high enough rate to perform these signal processing tasks? Maybe, but I don't think the economics work. It's probably much cheaper to just use a proper high-speed PHY in the first place.
  - hinkley 9y ago
    Thunderbolt cables have noise cancelling logic in them, to increase the max cable length by several multiples.
phkahler 9y ago
“The whole market is getting closer to reality,” Freeman says. “I don’t think substrates are a gating factor. We’re still looking for that killer app.” How about an inkjet printer that can print OLEDs and circuits? People can design light-up signs and even have small circuits to control changing patterns. I want to print a processor with RAM/ROM on one side and some kind of display on the other. This would be both widely usable and a boon to electronics education.
- Scipio_Afri 9y ago
  Would be amazing... but realistically I think the only way we could do that is with a material like graphene/graphite and that probably is several decades away.
  - phkahler 9y ago
    I have a memory of an article about an early OLED display that was made using an inkjet style printer with special materials. That was at least a decade ago.

51 points by SemiTom 9y ago

Can someone help me understand - is the non-traditionalness of these chips enabled by continued shrinking of transistors, or something else? Are we on a new learning curve?

hinkley 9y ago
From the article, it’s defining traditional chips and those built on wafers cut from crystalline silicon. Hybrids are circuits built on top of something other than these wafers. Often a flexible material (for flexible chips) or on glass (eg to build the display logic into the surface of an LCD Panel)

hinkley 9y ago

Question for the collective: As data rates in cables have gone up, designers have resorted to putting codecs into the housing at the end(s) of the cables to keep up. In some cases this has made for connectors that are only slightly smaller than those from the 90’s. Can flexible circuits switch at a high enough rate to perform these signal processing tasks? I’m imagining building the circuits into the ends of the cable itself (under the strain protector?) instead of the housing. Or do we just wait for smaller chips?

wmf 9y ago
resorted to putting codecs into the housing at the end(s) of the cables AFAIK that's just DisplayLink and one Apple dongle and it's more due to backward compatibility than data rates. Can flexible circuits switch at a high enough rate to perform these signal processing tasks? Maybe, but I don't think the economics work. It's probably much cheaper to just use a proper high-speed PHY in the first place.
- hinkley 9y ago
  Thunderbolt cables have noise cancelling logic in them, to increase the max cable length by several multiples.

phkahler 9y ago

“The whole market is getting closer to reality,” Freeman says. “I don’t think substrates are a gating factor. We’re still looking for that killer app.” How about an inkjet printer that can print OLEDs and circuits? People can design light-up signs and even have small circuits to control changing patterns. I want to print a processor with RAM/ROM on one side and some kind of display on the other. This would be both widely usable and a boon to electronics education.

Scipio_Afri 9y ago
Would be amazing... but realistically I think the only way we could do that is with a material like graphene/graphite and that probably is several decades away.
- phkahler 9y ago
  I have a memory of an article about an early OLED display that was made using an inkjet style printer with special materials. That was at least a decade ago.