They didn’t invent printed semiconductors, but Milpitas-based start-up Kovio is perhaps best poised to own the market, according to an article in Monday’s San Jose Mercury News. Its senior executives hail from semiconductor heavyweights AMD and Applied Materials, while Sun Microsystems’ founding CEO and celebrated venture capitalist Vinod Khosla helms the board. In addition, an impressive 13 venture-capital firms (including Kleiner Perkins) and corporations have an investment stake in the company.
But what is a printed chip and why all the hype?
Well, printed semiconductors can hold a ton of information but are simple and potentially cheap enough to be printed onto such things as food labels and clothing tags. While traditional semiconductors require a tedious, time-consuming and resource-heavy manufacturing process — resulting in a relatively high cost and, unfortunately, quite a bit of toxic waste — printed chips, by design, can be printed cheaply on much simpler equipment.
The key to this cheap chip magic is a silicon-based ink (pictured above) that can be printed onto all kinds of materials for as little as 5 cents a pop. Kovio is planning to open the world’s first printed chip manufacturing plant by the end of the month, according to the Mercury News article:
“By using inkjet and other types of printers, the company plans to make radio frequency identification devices — so called RFID tags. Such tags traditionally contain microchips, but are so expensive now their use has been relatively limited.”
Hewlett-Packard and a number of other tech companies also are working on printed chip technology, which some say has the potential to revolutionize the computer industry by making whole new categories of cheap and flexible semiconductor-based products possible. Some niches that could be profoundly touched by this innovative technique, according to the article, include “solar panels, disposable blood glucose sensors and gadgets for displaying various types of information.”
One highly sought application would be flexible screens that can be folded like a newspaper or made large and wrapped around buildings. It’s still in the early stages, but could be the chip industry’s next big bump.
Photo courtesy of Kovio