3-D Flexible Computer Chips

Roland Piquepaille writes "Engineers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have isolated a single-crystal film of semiconductor from the substrate on which it is built. Then they transferred this very thin film — 200 nanometers thick — on plastic. Both sides of the film can host active components and several layers can be stacked, opening the way to very powerful 3-D flexible computer chips. Besides computer chips, this technique could be used for solar cells, smart cards, RFID tags or active-matrix flat panel displays."

Heat dissipation..... not a major issue

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Heat dissipation is only a significant issue in a very small number of CPUs like x86s and PowerPCs. Most CPUs you'll encounter in your average day (phone, car, mouse, PDA, refridgerator, washing machine, air conditioner, ...) use very little power and you don't heat up that you can notice.

This is new .. how?

[Bender_]

This is not new - this is known as "susbtrate transfer process" and has been practiced for year. One company doing very advanced work in this is Philips:

First two paper hits I found in google:

http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/ectm013.pdf [tudelft.nl]
http://retina.et.tudelft.nl/data/artwork/publicati on/hf/111568631.pdf [tudelft.nl]

Many companies are also working on substrate transfer processes to build silicon wafers with selective crystal orientation. Among them IBM and Soitec.