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Does anyone have a good idea for use cases for these? It seems a lot of use cases for "small, cheap electronics" are already covered by RFID, where you keep the processing "smarts" in the device that reads the RFID. So when do you need actual computation to take part on each tiny chip? Some kind of "smart dust" mesh network? (assuming you can pair these chips with an antenna and power source)
What value they will add, may well vary, but a few pennies upon many items they would be targeting, well those items mostly borderline latent-landfill at best and whilst it is cheap upfront. Is it cheap to recycle or more costly? Equally the enviromental risks of the ones not recycled is often overlooked and easy to say something is recyclable when that depends upon every single one being recycled. many recyclable plastic waste in the environment already, so I'm somewhat of mixed feelings about this in the respect of how it may well pan out being utilized.
Does anyone have a good idea for use cases for these? It seems a lot of use cases for "small, cheap electronics" are already covered by RFID, where you keep the processing "smarts" in the device that reads the RFID. So when do you need actual computation to take part on each tiny chip? Some kind of "smart dust" mesh network? (assuming you can pair these chips with an antenna and power source)
These devices are something like one tenth the price of a regular passive RFID tag.
What's the advantage of a processor that costs less than a penny? I would think that the connectors, battery, I/O, etc. would cost at least 10-25 cents for pretty much anything you can think of. So not sure how much you gain from making the CPU so cheap, unless there are other benefits like power consumption.
There are ways to print solar panels on a plastic substrate too, and led's look possible. NFC antennas are already doable with the same process. When all the devices can be 'printed', you might be able to put electronics on pages in books/newspapers or on labels of products for zero cents because you're already putting that paper through a printing press.
Great, a thinking banana.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is the cost of the substrate a huge barrier in the field? I recall when gallium arsenide first came to market and when whatever was magic about ibm "copper" and diamond/graphite. Each time, it's wound up highly context specific and frankly not very informative to the market as I saw it. A cheap plastic substrate for low gate count functions might be a niche which fills supply chains in smart disposables, rfid and oth…
GaAs is a workhorse in the RF world and let people replace a lot of vaccuum tubes.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
These devices are something like one tenth the price of a regular passive RFID tag.
That may well be down to the cost of the metal to make the inductive coil. Now if you add the ability to do comparable RFID comms using this chip, then how would the costs compare is what we do not know.
More of these please - the opportunities must be there
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>It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor. It's pretty common to call current processors "silicon chips", what's wrong with calling ones on a plastic substrate plastic chips?
In silicon ICs, the silicon is actually part of the transistors.