22-05-2012, 03:04 PM
Circuits in Plastic (CiP)
CiP is a new method of electronics manufacture for circuits and systems.
The circuit “board” is a plastic sheet. All components are placed in divots in the sheet. The conductor is screen printed onto a thin cover sheet which is then thermally bonded to the circuit board to form the complete electronic system.
Some advantages include:
o Recycled plastic can be used for the circuit board.
o The circuit is water-proof
o The thermal process is at a much lower temperature compared to the solder process so lower carbon foot-print during manufacture.
o There is no etching or soldering requirement.
o The enclosure is formed at the same time as the circuit is formed.
o At end-of-life, the cover sheet is mechanically removed and the circuit components are then removed. The plastic board can be recycled. (lower carbon footprint when compared to shredding and incineration of traditional printed circuit board construction)
Chip stacking technology
The IBM breakthrough enables the move from horizontal 2-D chip layouts to 3-D chip stacking, which takes chips and memory devices that traditionally sit side by side on a silicon wafer and stacks them together on top of one another. The result is a compact sandwich of components that dramatically reduces the size of the overall chip package and boosts the speed at which data flows among the functions on the chip.
“The new method eliminates the need for long-metal wires that connect today’s 2-D chips together, instead relying on through-silicon vias, which are essentially vertical connections etched through the silicon wafer and filled with metal. These vias allow multiple chips to be stacked together, allowing greater amounts of information to be passed between the chips.
The technique shortens the distance information on a chip needs to travel by 1000 times, and allows for the addition of up to 100 times more channels, or pathways, for that information to flow compared to 2-D chips.