3 ms·
Why wouldn't it be? Winding a wire over a coil requires robotics. Making large, complicated 3D objects is finicky, slow, and expensive. Lithography is relativel
by quotemstr 6y ago
Why wouldn't it be? Winding a wire over a coil requires robotics. Making large, complicated 3D objects is finicky, slow, and expensive. Lithography is relatively simple --- it's a uniform batch process. Lithography nodes are complicated and expensive to research --- new nodes require brand new technology and even science --- but once you have a lithography line set up, you can run it over and over and over and over again, because the actual batch process is relatively simple and uniform.
- the8472 6y agoSo winding the coil requires robotics. And any lithography process requires robotics, cleanrooms, aggressive chemistry, vacuum chambers and whatnot.
- quotemstr 6y agoYes, but coiling stuff requires more complex robotics and a robot per coil, since you can wind a wire around only one coil at a time. With big lithography processes, your robot can be simpler (since it doesn't need to reach around or inside a complex shape) and it can process thousands of devices (on a big wafer) all at once instead of individually.
- megous 6y agoWinding a simple coil, like the ones inside speakers, requires just fixing a wire and rotating the core: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3wogoUsjc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Np3wogoUsjc You can make the same maching with many parallel winding heads + cutters and make as many coils as you like in parallel.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- adamweld 6y agoThis is absolutely not true for the miniaturized balanced armature drivers that this MEMS speaker design is competing with. The coil must be wound in-situ and is usually epoxy potted due to fragility. https://navcomm.eu/img/cms/BA%20opis.jpg https://navcomm.eu/img/cms/BA%20opis.jpg
- megous 6y agoHmm, that's quite a different kind of a beast.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- regularfry 6y agoI would suggest hitting up "speaker coil winding" on YouTube if you think this requires robotics. Sometimes the simplest thing is "pay a human $8/hour". You don't even need to spend millions on a litho node to make it work.
- kazinator 6y agoThis is about miniature speakers, like in ear-buds headphones, not Celestions for your guitar cabinet.
- willis936 6y agoYes but if you want a million an hour, that’s $8 million/hour. Suddenly photolithography seems incredibly cheap.
- zaarn 6y agoDoes it take an hour to wind a coil? Probably not. At worst, a minute for an experienced worker. That gets you to 130'000 $ per hour and 0.13$ human cost per device. Though a minute is very optimistic, you don't need that many windings, if you get it down to 10 seconds, which is a lot of time to wind a coil, you pay 22'000$ and 0.02$ per product. That's fairly cheap and if a robot can do it for less becomes questionable because robots need a lot of maintenance and cost a lot.
- willis936 6y agoWhat if you want 100 billion an hour?
- regularfry 6y agoThen you're screwed no matter what process you use. 100 billion 1 gramme devices is 100,000 tonnes. Per hour. For reference, that's about half the discharge rate of the Rio Grande.
- jononor 6y agoBatch here is the key. One can make 100-10'000 elements at the same time. This using the same equipment and processes that is used for fabrication of other MEMS sensors, techniques that are proven to deliver sub-dollar end-user costs for high performance microphones, accelerometers, temperature sensors, etc.
- Florin_Andrei 6y agoI think OP was referring to the fact that coil speakers are something that Isaac Newton could have made, if he knew how, whereas solid state is just not doable without modern tech.