Hi Jacob Thanks for your contribution! So much appreciated! <3 Hmm... while the initial circuits may not be suitable for hardcore number crunching for hashing blocks, we might be able to use it for prototyping our layouts at home, which already would be awesome progress, especially if it could be done with chemicals which can be bought without ending up on a terror watch list. It would be interesting to see, whether we could build simple circuits like a 555 or maybe even a simple RISC-V MCU with it. Hagen shared another document here BTW: https://sci-hub.ee/https://doi.org/10.1002/adma.201302278
What's in your opinion the best way for patterning of structures using such polymer? I was thinking, we could mix some photoreactive polymer like the photoresist commonly used for photomasks in semiconductor manufacturing and then modify the chemical formulas in order to give them those dopant accepting properties. Then we could even use acryllic glas or so as a substrate (given the surface is enough smooth)
Cheers -lev
On Tuesday, March 8, 2022 7:28:47 PM WET Jacob Lifshay wrote:
On Tue, Mar 8, 2022, 10:00 David Lanzendörfer leviathan@libresilicon.com
wrote:
Hi No. They've asked about printing chips, which would include some highly specialized submicron nozzle and special polymers: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2020/tc/d0tc01341b
It might really be a feasible option for manufacturing LibreSilicon layouts...
Any chemists around?
well...i have nearly no practical experience, but i do know a lot of chemistry...
From what I can tell, they're comparing organic semiconductors that they made with an electro-spinning-style process with organic semiconductors that were spin-coated onto a SiO2/Si substrate (the substrate is implied to be just a handy surface to put their organic semiconductors on, it doesn't have silicon transistors afaict)...their process looks like it could be quite useful, if you want organic semiconductors. organic semiconductors generally have several problems when compared to silicon transistors:
- they are much larger, the resolution you can achieve with silicon is
usually several orders of magnitude smaller (tens of nm vs 10-100um). 2. organic semiconductors generally have worse electrical performance than silicon, often by several orders of magnitude -- this is beyond just what the size difference would give. 3. organic semiconductors often degrade quickly (years) vs. silicon which can last tens - hundreds of years. Think OLED screen burn-in.
if you want to build cryptocurrency miners and you care about energy efficiency (hashes per joule), organic semiconductors are a pretty terrible choice, because 1 and 2 combine to give terrible performance and low density.
if you're working with a cryptocurrency where the algorithm changes every week, organic semiconductors might have an advantage, since you could print new ones each week, and hopefully the circuits would be better than a general purpose processor.
Jacob