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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_HackingYes, 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" _________________________________ Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/ Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/ Contact: projekt oekonux.de
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