spherical chips

[David Cary <d.cary@xxxxxxxx>]

I'm fascinated by concept of "challenge your assumptions; buck the trend;
change the rules;" -- doing things in a clever, but completely different
way. Other than MISC, the most assumption-challenging development I've
heard of recently is

  Ball Semiconductor Inc.
  http://www.ballsemi.com/

Rather than designing digital logic to fit on the top surface of thin
rectangular slabs of silicon, these people claim they can put digital logic
on the outer surface of 1 mm (and smaller) spheres of silicon.

Presumably one would use sphere-packing and put them in a DIP package, or
perhaps embed them in a smart credit card.

The people at MISC might find it interesting to think about how to lay out
circuits that cover a sphere. If you just take a normal square or
rectangular layout, you have to warp it pretty badly to make it cover even
half a sphere.

I still don't understand how they do the photolithography on a sphere.

Will the standard methods of bonding wires to a chip work if the chip is
spherical ?

--
+ David Cary "mailto:d.cary@ieee.org"; "http://www.rdrop.com/~cary/";
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