Printing discrete electronics

[kunkmiester]

Got into this since remembering that I wanted to look it up. I'd heard about Nanosolar-- http://www.nanosolar.com/ a good while ago, but got to thinking about their manufacturing technique.

I was originally thinking that if you can make a solar cell, why not an LED? imagine having yards of material covered in white or multi-color LEDs. But then I got to thinking that if you can do those two, discrete components like transistors shouldn't be hard either. And if you can do it on a high speed press, an inkjet should be able to do it too, albeit with much smaller economies of scale. Other, non semiconductor materials would be done with other "inks." Wiki isn't showing non-solar use of CIGS, but I'd imagine an appropriate material could be found.

The big thing I'm be worried about is power rating--making a power switching MOSFET that can take a few amps would be the goal for a production system. Other "inks" can be used to get the other components, resistors, capacitors, etc. going, only things like large inductors that would need an actual coil wound would be difficult to do.

To put this in the perspective of what I want, imagine you designed a circuit. You send the designs to a set of machines across your lab/office. From one, you get a multi-layer circuit board. The next is this machine, and the plastic sheet holds all the discrete components needed for the circuit. From the third comes a couple of microchips, made up in prefabbed SMD DIPs. A bit of soldering later, and you have a fully functional circuit board to take into the conference room and show off.

[hanelyp]

Look up:
- organic LEDs.
- amorphous and polycrystalline solar cells.

Generally, amorphous and polycrystalline semiconductors don't perform as well as single crystal devices. But for large area low density devices they may be attractive.