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from the biodegradable-chips-give-new-meaning-to-"computer-virus" dept.
Technicians from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in collaboration with the Department of Agriculture Forest Products Laboratory (FPL), have demonstrated the feasibility of replacing the substrate of a computer chip with cellulose nanofibril (CNF), a flexible, biodegradable material made from wood.
The full paper is available. From the abstract:
Today's consumer electronics, such as cell phones, tablets and other portable electronic devices, are typically made of non-renewable, non-biodegradable, and sometimes potentially toxic (for example, gallium arsenide) materials. These consumer electronics are frequently upgraded or discarded, leading to serious environmental contamination. Thus, electronic systems consisting of renewable and biodegradable materials and minimal amount of potentially toxic materials are desirable. Here we report high-performance flexible microwave and digital electronics that consume the smallest amount of potentially toxic materials on biobased, biodegradable and flexible cellulose nanofibril papers. Furthermore, we demonstrate gallium arsenide microwave devices, the consumer wireless workhorse, in a transferrable[sic] thin-film form. Successful fabrication of key electrical components on the flexible cellulose nanofibril paper with comparable performance to their rigid counterparts and clear demonstration of fungal biodegradation of the cellulose-nanofibril-based electronics suggest that it is feasible to fabricate high-performance flexible electronics using ecofriendly materials.
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:10PM
My computer is close to 8 years old and works fine. With biodegradable chips, I fear I won't get that sort of life time.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by WillAdams on Thursday May 28 2015, @06:23PM
Yep, my Fujitsu Stylistic ST-4121 is coming up on 12 years old, and I despair of replacing it --- just can't find anything which has:
- active digitizer / stylus
- daylight viewable display
- reasonable size / weight and slate form factor so it'll fit in my laptop bag (which is over 25 years old)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 28 2015, @07:06PM
Yeah what it means is you'd get more stuff in landfills because they stopped working when some fungus broke something.
A lot of these devices don't need much of their semiconductors to fail to end up in a landfill. And once they do there's not really a big difference between current devices and their device, in fact their crap might be worse - since it breaks down to smaller stuff that isn't actually going to be digested and recycled by fungi or bacteria.
tldr; = stupid idea.
(Score: 2) by monster on Friday May 29 2015, @05:06PM
What starts as a stupid idea might give way to another bright one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 29 2015, @01:45AM
you do realize you are very much in the minority, right? perhaps not on this site, but in the 1st world at large. obsolescence is already planned. i commend you for not living by the current beat of the world's drum. but like i said, you are the minority. biodegradable electronics will be a god-send for the planet. even more so if they are made of wood. you've probably heard the argument about saving endangered species by turning them into livestock. well, same thing goes for trees. if we keep using less and less paper and other wood products, you're going to see less trees. i hope the environmental and aesthetic value of trees are obvious.