Spray-on IC
MIT Technology Review ran a very interesting story about printable electronics this week. Kovio, a company spun out of MIT’s Media Lab, announced a new process for printing transistors with inkjet printing techniques. According to this report, Kovio may begin production with disposable smart cards for public transit. Performance of Kovio devices will be better than what has been reported to date for IC’s created with commercial printing technology. The reason is that Kovio is the only group known to be applying this approach to inorganic materials.
Technology Review predicted several products for printed electronics including RFID tags and very large, full wall type displays. For a real potential boost to RFID adoption for inventory control, TR suggests that the cost of making an RFID tags this way could dip well below five cents.
But SI Senior Scientist, Dr. Ray Haythornthwaite, made these predicitions more than five years ago. In a report that was too early for its time or our sales force, Ray had already predicted electronic “wallpaper” that would change according to your mood or desire for instant redecorating. (Satisying my wife’s interior design whims would be so much easier if this product was available today.) The landmark, An Examination of Current Developments and Future Directions of Organic Semiconductor Technology (March 2002), provided a thorough examination of the early research into organic electronics and predicted the future for the technology. Everyone is still looking forward, but the field seems to be inching closer to making some real products.
Perhaps the killer app for ink-jet IC printing is the RFID tag. Ray also foresaw this as an obvious use for this technology. His rationale was that the packing box was there anyway, space was not (usually) at a premium. Why not just spray it on? Oddly enough, this outside-the-box thinking came at a time when our own spin-off company, Symagery Microsystems, was trying to break into the 2D barcode space. The transitioning of barcodes from 1D to 2D was evolutionary. The idea of printing a smart RFID tag to completely replace the barcode was certainly revolutionary. Ray is now retired from Semiconductor Insights but is available part-time for consulting in the semiconductor field. I don’t want to put his email here for spambots, but he is not hard to find on the web (not many Haythornthwaites in my phone book anyways).
Perhaps we can coin a new term in this nanotech era – millitech for millimeter-scale electronics. Using the ubiquitous ink-jet reverses some other trends – maybe even Moore’s Law. Millitech scaling trends and large scale integration would refer to ever-larger circuits covering more available real estate. This may put technology into the hands of ordinary people in contrast to the evermore exclusive club of megacorporations that can afford to build billion dollar wafer fabs. Consider one San Francisco artist who attempted to use nanobots as a form of high-tech graffiti, littering the little electronic insects around. Why not stick to a more traditional style of the art using spray cans? Different colors are replaced by the various transistor building materials, and voila! A new urban art form is born that can sense its audience, react and vary the imagery according to it.
Spray-on ICs – why not? Here are some links to some other, perhaps less-anticipated products offered in such a form:
http://gizmodo.com/gadgets/technology/spray-on-a-computer-133076.php
http://nexus404.com/Blog/2006/12/01/spray-condom/
http://www.cpr-savers.com/Industrials/bandas2/bandage%20spray.html
http://www.thisnext.com/item/21BD8AB8/NYC-Organic-Spray-On-Tan