
ARM charts out the path to printed plastic chips - rwmj
https://semiaccurate.com/2015/11/18/arm-charts-path-printed-plastic-chips/
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tgflynn
Can someone explain what this technology is about, I wasn't able to get any
sort of understanding from this post.

What exactly are they printing ? Are the transistors actually made of plastic
instead of doped silicon ? If so what feature sizes are possible with this
technology ? How does the manufacturing process compare with Si ? etc...

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colechristensen
They printed a microcontroller die using organic semiconductors. The feature
size is 2 microns. The technology is somewhat comparable to burning optical
discs.

What you can imagine out of this technology is a moore's law type reduction in
feature size. Not too far off you could imagine a box where you could print
arbitrary chips on a whim.

What it is is orders of magnitude cheaper and faster production of complex
microchips.

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tgflynn
I've heard of organic semiconductors but I had no idea they had advanced to
the point where they could be used for an SoC. Is 2 microns small enough for
an ARM core ?

This sounds like it could become very important. Do you know of any sites that
do a better job of explaining this technology ?

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mrob
It's smaller than the ARM2 (first commercially available ARM), which was 2.5µm
according to
[http://everything2.com/title/ARM2](http://everything2.com/title/ARM2) .

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ph0rque
If I understand this correctly, this opens the path to 3D-printing plastic
chips. If so, this is amazing.

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jsprogrammer
The graph looks linear because it is using a log scale.

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roymurdock
> as ARM shows above, the imprint and deposition transistor world is following
> a shrinking path that looks like Moore’s Law, or in our view it is somewhat
> linear.

Red flag when a guy writing about bleeding edge transistor technology doesn't
understand the main point of Moore's law - exponential growth in density,
which is usually converted to a log scale making it appear linear in nature.

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revelation
I don't understand, transistors are already dirt cheap compared to what you
pay for IP and market segmentation.

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coliveira
The great advantage would be for individuals to create their own designs.
Right now chips are very cheap as long as you produce millions of them. If you
come up with your own chip design it is very expensive to produce them. The
ability to crate your own chip can make it possible for individuals to design
customized machines, where the instructions would be created to solve
particular problems. For example, a Lisp machine could be easily created to
support exactly the instructions needed by Lisp.

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andrewflnr
More importantly IMO, it lets you potentially get rid of dark silicon, and
make open source hardware a reality.

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FeepingCreature
How's power consumption in comparison?

