
Non-Traditional Chips Gaining Steam - SemiTom
https://semiengineering.com/non-traditional-chips-gaining-steam/
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hinkley
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?

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wmf
_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
Thunderbolt cables have noise cancelling logic in them, to increase the max
cable length by several multiples.

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phkahler
“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
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
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.

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obblekk
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
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)

