Re: Home built PCBs

["Kragen \"Skewed\" Sitaker" <kragen@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, 21 Nov 1997 wmor1@student.monash.edu.au wrote:
> Certainly would be cheaper than fabbing, but who would be interested 
> in buy these macro products, wouldn't they be too slow and not as 
> effective as surfacemounting a real chip? 

Well, you know, a 500-MHz Alpha can add two numbers together in two
nanoseconds.  It can do this over and over, and it can do some pretty
impressive things.

My brain, on the other hand, takes several million times as long to do
even its most basic operations, like firing a neuron.  But there are still
things my brain can do that we haven't yet figured out how to make the
Alpha do.

If I could print real circuits that would work at a couple of kilohertz,
even, I think it might be worthwhile.  Programming a massively parallel
machine is much more difficult, but it might be able to do things that
aren't practical with serial machines.

The research I was talking about was for printing entire circuits, not
just metal traces, using conventional printing processes.  The active
elements in the circuits were composed of polymer semiconductors.

Cool stuff.

Kragen