Printed electronics firm prints more money in quest for safer poultry

Printed electronics pioneer Thinfim successfully squeezed shareholders for another 26.8m Norwegian Kroner yesterday, following the announcement of a real customer for its printed memory circuits. The money was raised through a warrant issue to existing shareholders; despite its current size of around 20 people Thinfim is …

[jake]

Eh?

I was doing thickfilm & thinfilm screen printing of circuitry onto beryllium substrates in my garage back when I had a side-line building hybrids ... in 1979. With 8K of memory available, if needs be. On a 1-3cm square chip, with laser-cut resistors & hand-placed SMT kit (pick & place machines were not quite there, yet). Gold-ball bonding provided the "wire" between some components, and to the external world. Add a stainless steel cap to the resulting DIP, seal it with epoxy in a Nitrogen environment, and you've got something that'll last for awhile ... Did everything these clowns are claiming ... and more. Can you say "270G shock resistant", for a start?

Several that I built a third of a century ago are still running greenhouses.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Eh?

Can you say "non-carcenogenic" and "non toxic"?

[jake]

@AC 08:22 (was: Re: Eh?)

Are you eating/breathing/snorting/bathing in chicken packaging? Really? Me, I grow, slaughter & unpackage my own chickens ... It ain't exactly rocket science.

Manufacturing my kit thirty-odd years ago was as safe as I could make it. This kit seems to be as safe as can turn a share-holder's purse-strings.

[Intractable Potsherd]

Re: Eh?

Okay, jake - apart from the fact you did something similar years ago, what is your point?

[jake]

@Intractable Potsherd (was: Re: Eh?)

My point? The fact that marketards are completely cocking-up high-tech. They use boardroom bingo buzzwords, and try to fleece shareholders with them.

It's a fine example of "If you can't dazzle 'em with brilliance, baffle 'em with bullshit."

Overall, the proletariat lose while the rich get richer.

[Alain Moran]

Finally a use for QR codes

Just have the display generate a QR code containing the data - scanners are ubiquitous and don't require contact.

[KjetilS]

Re: Finally a use for QR codes

My guess is that the program required to generate and display a QR code is quite a lot more complex than the ThinFilm circuits can handle

[Alain Moran]

Re: Finally a use for QR codes

Possibly, however that's something they can work towards solving ... after all if they're only up to creating a couple of transistors, then how useful is that really? An entire ATMega48 on the other hand could be really interesting!

http://ch00ftech.com/2012/10/27/qr-clock/

[John Smith 19]

The actual comparison should be with Plastic Logic

They have spunked invested something like an order of magnitude more cash in this area to get (apparently) less result.

For those who don't get what the big deal is over thin film or thick film technology.

1)Flexible, not brittle substrates (unlike both) 2) Transistors mfg in situ (unlike thick film) 3)Significantly safer materials 4)Designed for very high volume production and disposable use 5) Typically mfg temperatures in the low 100s of C, rather than the 700-900c firing temps of hybrids. 6)Much lower clock frequencies than thick film (but above what I know of the SoA for thin film).

Interestingly they also seem to working on making an on substrate clock. This is very tricky but the ability to deliver a high quality clock without a separate quartz chip is a major step forward.

[Alan Brown]

That's Tesco buggered

Or more likely they'll simply refuse to buy anything with packaging showing that the stackers routinely let the frozens thaw.

Actually for simple over/under temperature and shock indication there are already one-shot devices available and cheap enough to be used on consumer packaging. The fact that they're not routinely used says a lot about the supply chain.