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This is another of those things kicking around in the back of my head that ought to be possible, yet I can find no evidence of it anywhere.
Printer technology these days is pretty trick. Given the advances in reproduction resolution I can see no reason why it shouldn't be possible to print conductive
inks onto synthetic substrates, producing high precision circuitry for a fraction of the cost of current hardware.
A modified laser printer, with inks made from specialised materials to carry a thin solution of silicon or germanium and a stock of very smooth, flexible synthetic paper should form the basis of a revolution in the industry. At first I thought of inkjet but I've realised there are continuity problems with the dithering patterns they lay down. Solid fill colors, as printed by a laser printer, would be far more likely to be useful.
Interlayering with insulation materials could possibly see the advent of complex computers made on what appear to be sheets of paper. Solid state storage devices could be made the same way.
Walk into your local computer store and order your computer to spec, on the spot. Have a coffee while it is printed and installed in a case.
"That P4 3.6... make it a notebook."
EE Times -Scientist makes photonic circuits with inkjet printer
http://www.eetimes....ws/OEG20020410S0013
Baking [krelnik, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
High-resolution inkjet printing of all-polymer transistor circuits
http://www.ncbi.nlm...18142&dopt=Abstract
Baking [krelnik, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Inkjet Printing of Transparent Conducting Oxides
http://www.azom.com....asp?ArticleID=2156
Baking [krelnik, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Laser Printer Transfer Foil
http://www.papilio....%20green%20red.html
Bake it yourself. Should be high enough resolution for basic circuits, and gold is nicely conductive. [Worldgineer, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Plastic Logic
http://www.plasticlogic.com/
"...the power of electronics with the pervasiveness of printing to put electronics where you want, when you want." [phoenix, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
Printed power
http://www.newscien...82400&sub=Computing
This concept is used to 'print' batteries now. [waugsqueke, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]
[link]
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Food for thought. Design organic/inorganic substrate to respond to its environment and change shape, before printing circuits on the substrate. After the substrate responds to what environment effect stresses it you are left with a 3-D configured circuit nugget. |
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This is done now (printing circuits), but I think you'll be disappointed at the size of your P4 at the resolutions your laser printer is capable of. |
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Preheated in science fiction - watches on shirt sleeves. They're only good for a set number of washes, however. |
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Hmmm... I was thinking more of computers on demand. Just print the circuit boards, chips required and take it away. The slant of the annotations seems to be more to the point that circuit boards are already printed. We knew that; That's why they're called Printed Circuit Boards. |
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The idea is for computer outlets to rent the source codes and print them as required. |
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I'm not overly concerned about the image size limitations of current laser printers. The limiting factor there is toner particle size. Metallic inks should be possible down to just a few thousandths of a micron, if we put some effort into it. |
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Batteries can be printed now (linko). |
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[Zanzibar] Good idea, but do you realize that a P4 has something like literally 50,000,000 transistors. Don't forget about the chipset, BIOS, RAM (About 8 million per megabyte), and the routing circuitry. Where would the capacitors go? I'm thinking this is more doable if you could come up with a way to print sockets on the board for the processor, RAM, etc. |
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Fair enough. That would be possible with multiple pass printing, I guess. If you can make a concrete jet printer to "print" houses then it should be possible to do the same with ink. |
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I had a similar idea a while back that this reminds me of. I consider it implausible that one could print actual chips with printers now because the resolution is still very far away from the current number of transistors on a tiny silicon wafer, and the current chips are printed on single crystal silicon in wafer fabs that are absolutely dust free(and have to be so). ON the other hand though using conductive ink and special plastic sheets I don't see why it wouldn't be possible to print a circuit board even on an inkjet. It wouldn't be able to carry much current because the conductive ink would still not be nearly as good as copper, but for most digital stuff it would be great. And if there were two "colors" conductive and non-conductive, you could even possibly do multilayer. That would make my (hobby) life infinitely easier. |
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