WOODEN computer chips reveal humanity's cyber elf future Boffins have developed a biodegradable semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood in an effort to alleviate the environmental burden of electronic devices. Technicians from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), have demonstrated the …
Fir goodness sake people, you really are taking the pith! Stop having a larch and think outside the box! This tech is oakay, and will become really poplar, as long as the world isn't full of Luddites pining for the alder days.
Ahem, got my coat, think I'd better make like a tree and leave...
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Is the epoxy environmentally friendly? We see a lot of fuss make about phthalate-free and the like.
What about spontaneous combustion? This is all well and good for "support chips" and. I agree even replacing those could be helpful but I wouldn't want a high-wattage graphics card made from paper.
Well, in the same way that a GRP structure is made from glass -- it's there but it's hardly recyclable. So, yes, perhaps I am being a bit silly typing about combustion but then perhaps these aren't really made from "paper" in any sense that we know it.
Don't get me wrong, I think it's great that they could cut down on things like Gallium Arsenide and do think this is a great idea. Perhaps it's just the El Reg article putting too much emphasis on the "wooden" part.
Non-critical consumer and low-frequency 'economical' circuit cards (e.g. parts of a television and of audio amplifier boards) are made from SRBP (super resin bonded paper) but this material is totally unsuited to high-frequency or high-density boards, where FR4 epoxy-fibreglass is used or even ceramics for SHF / microwave circuits.
One won't find many SRBP cards in an average desktop PC either for the same reasons.
Printed circuit substrate properties such as thermal expansion, dielectric constants, physical stability, copper / gold bonding strength and processing tolerance (chemical and thermal) are vital considerations especially as one drives higher in the frequency and density domains.
There is no 'fits all sizes' material for PCB manufacture.
How stable are these biodegradable materials while still on a working circuit board? If they degrade and the equipment prematurely fails as a result, they will just be increasing the amount of waste and cost of replacement. I'm sure manufacturers would be overjoyed if it forces consumers to buy more frequently. Some of us have electronic equipment still in use after twenty or more years.
It's one thing if your computer gets a virus infection, but what about a fungus infection?
... <ring> <ring>... Hello, my name's .... there's a problem with your Windows computer.... You appear to have a fungus....
Someone'll try it and many will fall for it.
Seriously, though you make a good point. If this thing can be developed to a level of acceptable reliability, ie essentially indefinite lifetime, then all well and good. If it becomes another excuse for planned obsolescence then not good.
Its early days. This is just a labgasm at the moment. (More research and much more funding needed, please). It may lead to who knows where for new devices / applications.
My main concern would be repeatability / reliability in mass production. We have organics elsewhere in electronics. They seem to have cracked the reliability / lifetime problems with lcd screens, organic led screens not yet. Probably the best comparison today might be the humble cd or dvd. Great variations in quality and reliability and precious little concrete info on which are best.
It'd be a shame if an exicting new technology got a bad name because of poor / cost reduced manufacturing processes.
"The majority of material in a chip is support. We only use less than a couple of micrometers for everything else, ..."
Isn't that true for silicon base chips as well? Silicon is not poisonous.
If the cellulose base degrades, doesn't that release the gallium arsenide (etc) active components? If a silicon chip is disposed of, at least the metals and other compounds are safely and physically locked into it.
It may be that the driving force behind this development is the energy and other costs of manufacture, especially for short run batches of specialist devices.
I was puzzled by this to so decided to read the original article.
In the case of RF electronics, gallium arsenide (GaAs) is used as the chip substrate not silicon. The technique basically involves slicing off the active top layer from the GaAs substrate and sticking it on to the cellulose substrate instead, resulting in around a hundred fold reduction in GaAs used in the chip. The remainder of the original GaAs substrate can then be reused to make more chips.
The technique works with silicon as well, but does not seem to provide any the environmental advantage.
Sound like accelerated planned obsolescence. No need to worry about your non-removable battery dying, your circuit boards will biodegrade long before that happens. What controls when this stuff begins to degrade?
And microchips are generally a very small part of most electronic systems, so while they go green and eat themselves the rest of a product by volume - say >>99% - still needs to be recycled the old fashioned way. What's next? Go back to making everything out of wood?
Dunno about anyone else, but I like my electronics to last, not start biodegrading after a couple of weeks/months/years. When - if - they do eventually die I take them to be recycled. What happens beyond that point is out of my control.
Build stuff to last, make sure it can be properly recycled when it does eventually pop its clogs. Being biodegradable is fine for shopping bags. Please please please don't apply it to electronics.
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the syslog that is in your own eye?"
Mathew 7:3 (almost)
By itself, fertilizer's decently safe (in terms of ANFO, it's only the AN). You need to mix in some fuel oil (FO) at the right concentrations to make the deadly combination. Also, most fertilizers contain denaturants meant to keep you from doing this. I recall the news noting the Oklahoma City bombers had to have had quite the skill not only to renature the fertilizer but also to figure out the right amount of fuel to add to their truck bomb.
IIRC the IRA were known to try to come up with other AN mixes like ANNIE that weren't as stable. Plus AN itself can go off under the wrong conditions (especially in the earlier days before they denatured AN intended for fertilizer). Recall the Texas City disaster which involved a ship full of the stuff. It got hot enough for the stuff to spontaneously detonate.
Ammonium nitrate (NH4NO3) decomposes exothermally at 210 °C in H2O (steam) and N2O (laughing gas). N2O is a better oxidizer than pure oxygen.
So a mixture of ammonium nitrate and organic matter is a powerful explosive. It is however known to explode spontaneously.
N2O in itself is stable. In 1914 Robert H. Goddard patented a rocket apparatus powered by N2O and gasoline.
From the article: "Boffins have developed a biodegradable semiconductor chip made almost entirely of wood."
Except that according to what I've read, the chip is still made of GaAs or Silicon or whatever it used to be made of. It's only the substrate on which the chip is mounted that is made of cellulose and epoxy.
But in microwave chips, the GaAs IS the substrate, too. According to the article, most of the toxic stuff isn't actually used for the transistors. By switching to a cellulose base, they cut the GaAs use drastically, using the toxic stuff more efficiently and not only stretching out use of the toxic stuff but also making the individual units more ecologically-friendly.
I'm not so interested in wireless but with a short-ish life and potentially high failure rate, such a thing could be a better fit for flash. Trade the cellulose for nitrocellulose, lay an extra isolated diode on the sheet, and you have instantly plausibly-deniable flashpaper memory. I wish I could say it looks good on paper but these particular TFTs are on glass, for shame.
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