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From: BGB <cr88192@gmail.com>
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Subject: Re: 208 B transistors !!
Date: Sun, 21 Apr 2024 14:10:06 -0500
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On 4/20/2024 11:28 PM, John Savard wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Apr 2024 22:41:01 +0000, mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
> wrote:
> 
>> In the early 1980s someone (Amdahl?) was working on wafer scale
>> lithography, apparently we have now arrived.....
> 
> Actually, several companies were. The one mentioned, Trilogy, was the
> one that spun off of Amdahl. There was also the company that was going
> to make the solid state storage wafer for the Sinclair, the name of
> which was Anamartic. Texas Instruments and ITT also researched its
> possibilities.
> 

On the other side of things, I am wondering what sorts of densities and 
clock speeds are possible with printed electronics on a plastic 
substrate (such as PET).

Information on the subject is fairly sparse, but inks seem to be 
available (albeit expensive), albeit with some variation as to printer 
technology. Seems to be be either organic or inorganic inks, with 
inkjet, offset, and screen printing, as the main variations in printer 
technology (with different inks for the different methods).



Though, I will assume that by inkjet, they don't mean just using a 
repurposed consumer-grade printer (possibly with the ROM's hacked to 
allow them to use refilled ink cartridges, with the non-standard inks).

Then again, with these things, they have created a situation where there 
are a lot of old inkjet printers around, mostly because it is often 
cheaper to buy a whole new printer than to buy the ink refill cartridges 
for said printer (vs, say, laser printers where the printer is more 
expensive, but the toner refills are more reasonable).

Looking around, it seems some people are instead using the more "office 
style" inkjet printers for this (which apparently allow for refilling 
the ink cartridges).


Also seems the N and P doped inks are rarer and more expensive than the 
conductive metallic and insulator inks.

No information on what sorts of densities are possible; crude guess is 
it is roughly a ~ 133333um process, based on the assumption of a 300 dpi 
printer (possibly more or less).

If one assumes, say, 6-dots width for a transistor, this would be ~ 
50x50 transistors per square inch, or possibly ~ 200k transistors per 
page...

I guess, if one could get it to run at MHz speeds, this could be enough 
for a CPU.

Though, would likely need multiple passes through the printer to print 
something like this, say:
   Print transistor layers;
   Bake the sheet;
   Print insulator and metal trace layers;
   Bake;
   Print more insulator and metal trace layers;
   Bake;
   ...

Possibly, a person could also print vias and then do multiple layers of 
transistors per page, possibly up to some set limit.


Not entirely sure how one would go about mapping digital logic onto 
printable layers though. This may well be the hard part.

I will make a guess that there are probably no Verilog to 
semiconductive-ink-PNG compilers.


....


> John Savard