Hi all, sorry for a late reply.
Many words could be wasted on this discussion. And while wasting words is
something I do a lot of, I'm going to be a bit concise for a change. Poke me
if you wish me to elaborate on any point.
First off, it should be clear to anybody who doesn't subscribe to
Bureaucracy Monthly that trusting a few large companies to keep their
designs free is something that will end badly. If systematic monopolization
is granted legally (by way of any process) to the likes of Intel, AMD,
Motorola, etc, it's only a matter of time until we all end up in tears. And
this is without even thinking about privacy issues or the subject of free
hardware (i.e., hardware that does what the owner wants it to, not what the
providers of the bits flowing through the hardware wants it to). Sun
Microsystems is the only large company that is approaching chip fabrication
with any sense of moral decency at the moment, and they're only doing so
because they can ramp up their market value by doing so. Morality sells,
oddly enough.
As for inkjet-style polymer based electronics.. phew. I wish. There have
been a number of attempts done at this. I refer to the following for more
information:
* S.B. Fuller, E.J. Wilhelm and J.M. Jacobson, Ink-jet printed
nanoparticle microelectromechanical systems, IEEE Journal of
Microelectromechanical Systems, Volume 11, Issue 1, p. 54-60
* B. A. Ridley, B. Nivi, and J. M. Jacobson, "All-inorganic field
effect transistors fabricated by printing," Science, vol. 286, pp. 746-749,
1999.
* Saul Griffith, Growing Machines, MIT PhD Thesis, 2004
* R.A. Lee and D.R. Whittaker, Laser created silicon vias for stacking
dies in MCMs, Electronics Manufacturing Technology Symposium, 1991.,
Eleventh IEEE/CHMT International
I can cite numerous other references about this subject. Suffice to say,
it's still a heavy research issue, mostly because, in my view:
* The people trying to do this stuff are still thinking of routing as a
preprocessing issue rather than just another plotting point
* People still think of transistors, etc, as bulky discrete elements
rather than little droplets of liquid 3 atoms across (as can be done, see
numerous articles online)
* People are not willing to accept a 30% failure rate on "inkjet" printed
surfaces, which is about what you can expect to get in terms of incorrectly
placed pixels, offsets and bad ink etc in tabletop inkjets.
* Redundancy in electronics is still considered expensive, despite
evidence to the contrary.
* Even if everybody had access to an "inkjet" that could print arbitrary
circuit boards, say with 26µm voxel/pixel granularity, most people wouldn't
have the foggiest idea what to do with it. The industrial revolution was
purposefully kept out of the homes by the owners of the methods and
processes. If you don't believe me, look at the history of knitting (an
excellent talk on the subject was done by Rose White at some conference, I
forget which.) This has slowed down the adoption of home electronics, and
it's frankly a wonder that the original Apple computer ever got built - true
piracy.
I recommend looking at the OpenSPARC II CPU if you're interested in this
kind of thing, and ask yourself "if I could make one of these in my kitchen
at zero marginal cost, how would it change the way I live my life?" I'd love
to hear your answer.
- Smári
Michel Bauwens wrote:
Graham,
if the content about us policy is true, thanks for letting us know any
details for publication, as this would be a bombshell ...
I don't know about polymer activities, so I'm copying a few people who
might be aware of it,
Michel
On Fri, Apr 11, 2008 at 3:49 PM, graham <graham theseamans.net> wrote:
Michel Bauwens wrote:
I think there is actually quite a bit of activity around open
hardware/physical production through open design communities
only 2-3 years ago, the field was in the doldrums, with negative
assessments of the previous wave of experiments (expressed by graham
seaman if I'm not mistaken); but as I discovered about 6 months ago,
and which prompted me to create the design pages, see
http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Design, the field is again in a
strong moment of re-emergence, with tons of practical projects
emerging in all kinds of fields:
http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking
Yes, that was me, though the assessment was only negative in the
sense that
the kind of cumulative process seen in the creation of Linux, which I
had
expected to see repeated in chip design, had not yet happened. I still
think
that what is happening now (in electronics, I don't know about other
areas)
shows that the underlying pressures towards peer production are still
there
- and even increasing - but that the breakthrough has not yet
materialized
(maybe a bad choice of word ;-).
Until recently I thought the sense of disappointment I felt was due
to my
having misunderstood the processes going on at a logical level; in
particular the relation between commercial and 'hobbyist' designers,
which
is clearly even more important here than it is for free software.
However, someone just sent me a huge pile of documents he says show
that
the US government has been systematically working to isolate any
medium to
large scale companies working with free designs. I'm not sure how real
this
is till I get a chance to read it (though the guy knows far more than
me
about both the technical and the commercial sides of electronics), or
what I
should do with it if it does look real, but it is certainly a
possibility.
In which case the reasons are political, and once again show the
tendency of
oekonux-like thinking to underestimate the political...
Aside from conventional chip design - do you know of anyone working
on free
development of polymer-based electronics using ink-jet printers? If
not, why
do you think there isn't? It seems such a logical area to extend to,
and
surely there must be people with both knowledge of polymers and links
to
peer production?
Graham
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de
--
Smári McCarthy
smari yaxic.org http://smari.yaxic.org
(+354) 662 2701 - "Technology is about people"