Researchers Suggest That Semiconductors Can be Grown Instead of Printed

[Guest]

Researchers proposed a new method of manufacturing "the smallest structures in electronics".

Researchers Suggest That Semiconductors Can be Grown Instead of Printed : Read more

 

[SneakySnake]

I want to become a semiconductor farmer. I can nurture my little babies to full growth before they're ready for the big wide world of processing.

 

[wannabepro]

When can I get one?
I call dibs on farming the Xeons and HD 9970s.

 

[457undead]

Whatcha farmin?

Semiconductors.

 

[freggo]

Will there be government subsidies for NOT farming a specific chip or circuit ?

 

[sylvez]

So.. there's gonna be a new Farmville game?

 

[Onus]

Michael Crichton's "Prey" had an interesting take on this. Without spoiling (it's a good story), bacteria were used to poop out the desired semiconductors.

 

[g-unit1111]

So when do the semi conductors become self aware?

 

[groundrat]

This is a very interesting development. Eventually this may lead to 5nm architectures or smaller. It may make the manufacturing process less expensive as well... after the retooling.

 

[southernshark]

[citation][nom]Groundrat[/nom]This is a very interesting development. Eventually this may lead to 5nm architectures or smaller. It may make the manufacturing process less expensive as well... after the retooling.[/citation]

They can already do 5nm................ and smaller as well at least in prototype.

What it should be able to do....... is allow much smaller companies to get into the game. Instead of needing a billion dollar facility to print wafers, a much smaller company could grow them.

 

[southernshark]

Of course one would still need a few million dollars to get set up, but compared with 1-2 billion....

 

[DryCreamer]

2 years? That's pretty quick...

Dry

 

[agnickolov]

Mother nature's been doing it for billions of years. It's called RNA. And the latest product is us.

 

[TeraMedia]

I think agnickolov has the right idea. Segments of DNA are used to make proteins all the time. If we could harness a similar concept to grow / construct clusters of atoms onto substrates, we could grow CPUs with smaller scale and more predictable behavior than the current methods will ever allow. Unfortunately, it took nature quite a while to get the process down right, and also to figure out what order to put the building blocks in to get the desired result.