MOTM

I thought most people here might enjoy this...

--Shemp

Heavy title, but I think this could be big...

With ongoing complaints about discontinued ICs, I thought it might be nice
to see some good news for synth DIY's future...

The ppl over at www.slashdot.org are having a dicsussion about recent
developments in "printable" computer technology:
http://slashdot.org/articles/01/03/01/2058229.shtml

It seems that a few companies are developing a technique based on inkjet
printer designs that would allow inexpensive custom IC fabrication. Its the
same technique they are developing for the new Light-Emitting Polymer
displays by printing semiconducting polymers onto a plastic substrate. The
circuits are fairly slow thus far (you probably cant make a 1MHz CPU), but
audio-frequency range circuit designs are probably quite feasible.

If it develops far enough, personal chip fabs could become very affordable
and people on the net could start Open-Sourcing their own analog synth IC
designs!

I know, I know... its all still vaporware, but I can dream cant I? :)
-Dan Gendreau

tentochi@... writes:

>>If it develops far enough, personal chip fabs could become very affordable 
and people on the net could start Open-Sourcing their own analog synth IC 
designs!<<

It would be great to beable to fabricate analog ICs right in your own home.  
It's too bad there can't be the analog equivilent of programmable logic and 
gate arrays.

-Elhardt

Note:  I haven't read the article, so perhaps I'm pretty far offbase here.

There's no reason why you couldn't do gate arrays and logic.  Digital
circuits are a subset of analog circuits, so if you can do analog, you can
do digital.  They say that they can't make a CPU because its too slow, but
simple gates and logic don't have to run at modern computer frequencies.
Even if the logic chips clocked at something like 50kHz, wouldn't that be
enough?

Sounds like fun to me!

--PBr

-----Original Message-----
From: elhardt@... [mailto:elhardt@...]
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2001 10:30 PM
To: motm@yahoogroups.com
Subject: Re: [motm] [OT] FW: [sdiy] The future of synth DIY


tentochi@... writes:

>>If it develops far enough, personal chip fabs could become very affordable

and people on the net could start Open-Sourcing their own analog synth IC 
designs!<<

It would be great to beable to fabricate analog ICs right in your own home.

It's too bad there can't be the analog equivilent of programmable logic and 
gate arrays.