IN NEW ADVANCE…INK USED ON CHIPS

[Anonymous]

In New Advance, Ink Used in Chips
November
2007A Silicon Valley start-up is claiming a breakthrough in producing
simple semiconductors by using a printing process, a goal for many
companies hoping to drive down the cost of electronic products.Kovio,
whose backers include widely known venture capitalist Vinod Khosla,
says it has developed a kind of silicon ink that can be sprayed on
flexible surfaces using commercial printing systems. Where some
companies have developed circuit-printing approaches with various
organic and inorganic materials, Kovio says it has used its
silicon-based process to build unusually fast devices called
thin-filmed transistors.”They look like they can be as cheap if not
cheaper than those working with organic materials,” says Raghu Das, an
analyst at IDTechEx, a market-research firm in Cambridge, England. “But
the performance of their devices is much higher.”

Closely held
Kovio, of Sunnyvale, Calif., hopes to apply its technology initially to
RFID, or radio frequency identification tags, a field where low cost is
paramount.
The race to apply printing techniques to electronics has
interested many large and small companies. Conventional computer chips
are fabricated by tracing circuit patterns on silicon wafers, building
and connecting transistors by adding and removing materials. Companies
such as Intel Corp. routinely spend $3 billion on a chip factory, yet
spraying on circuitry with inkjet-style printers could create usable
products for a fraction of the cost, backers of the concept say.

Not
that printing technology is expected to catch the capabilities of chip
makers, which now build hundreds of millions of transistors on each
product. But Kovio is confident that by the end of next year it will
make devices with less than a thousand transistors that are
sophisticated enough for many RFID applications, such as identifying
medicine bottles.”Intel’s claiming that they can put 30 million
transistors on the head of a pin,” says Amir Mashkoori, Kovio’s
chairman and chief executive. “All we’re trying to do is put a few
hundred transistors on a bottle.”

The company’s claims about the
benefits of its manufacturing process are likely to be closely
scrutinized, because rivals in markets such as RFID are rapidly driving
down the cost of products based on extremely tiny chips. Kovio has “a
promising technology,” said Victor Vega, director of technical
marketing at Alien Technology Corp., a specialist in the field. “But
it’s very premature still.”Kovio’s data shows that electrons move
through its printed transistors at about a fifth the speed of
transistors in a typical Intel chip but are about 100 times the speed
of simpler semiconductors used in computer displays, said Vivek
Subramanian, a company advisor who is an associate professor of
electrical engineering and computer science at the University of
California at Berkeley.The company’s plans have attracted a unit of
Cubic Corp. that makes automated fare-collection systems used in
subways and other transportation systems. Walt Bonneau, a Cubic senior
vice president and general manager, says he believes Kovio’s technology
can help reduce the cost of tags on new RFID-based fare cards that
riders pass near a wireless reader — replacing paper versions with
magnetic stripes that are slid through turnstiles.

[Author]

November 16, 2007 at 11:46 AM