It’s a cool idea and I would love to see it too. But you would be better off making something entirely different that leverages the strengths of biological computing instead of trying to make an integrated circuit. Past 1980s node sizes we rapidly got so small its well below the size of a cell or even complex proteins. Our current technology is roughly the size of DNA itself, and proteins are monstrous in size by comparison and tend to wiggle around like jello due to Brownian motion at molecular scales.
Interestingly I think you could probably make a green PCB process though. Currently we use ferrous solutions to etch copper which need to be neutralized and wreak Havok on waterways if they aren’t. I think making a biological biofilm that eats copper in certain areas and not others could work? It would be slower though, and honestly PCBs require some pretty intense feature sizes (not as bad as ICs but still really challenging) for things like tiny blind vias on extremely small traces. (Btw vias are like bridges from one layer of a circuit board to the next. A through via goes all the way through. A blind via is hidden within internal layers inside of a board)
Where I think this could be really cool is masking out vias and having your microbe drill for you over time. Surprisingly a large part of a PCB’s cost is tungsten drill bits. It’s still the fastest and most accurate way to drill fiberglass for forming vias but it’s slow when you need to do hundreds or thousands per board. For extremely small vias the bits get insanely expensive and fragile too.
Yeah I’m not clear about the scales. The article I linked talks about 1-3nm scale quantum dots semiconductors. I think the scale also influence performance like clock rate and waste heat production. So this idea might just be impossible, or only viable for pretty large and slow devices. For microcontrollers it might be enough though. And this might be able to make use of 3D better than lithography and be more compact.
I do imagine that biological cells could become the real “nanobots” that could be used for fabrication. Like nanobots might never be real because if they could work they’d already have evolved in nature. But maybe we could program cells to grow in very specific and complex shapes in a vat for fabrication, and different areas turn into different colors and material properties. This kinda must be possible. An alternative to injection molded plastics. PCBs could definitely work, although there might be a reason why they stick with fiberglass if the drill bits cost so much lol. I can also imagine this for “organ 3D printing”.
It’s a cool idea and I would love to see it too. But you would be better off making something entirely different that leverages the strengths of biological computing instead of trying to make an integrated circuit. Past 1980s node sizes we rapidly got so small its well below the size of a cell or even complex proteins. Our current technology is roughly the size of DNA itself, and proteins are monstrous in size by comparison and tend to wiggle around like jello due to Brownian motion at molecular scales.
Interestingly I think you could probably make a green PCB process though. Currently we use ferrous solutions to etch copper which need to be neutralized and wreak Havok on waterways if they aren’t. I think making a biological biofilm that eats copper in certain areas and not others could work? It would be slower though, and honestly PCBs require some pretty intense feature sizes (not as bad as ICs but still really challenging) for things like tiny blind vias on extremely small traces. (Btw vias are like bridges from one layer of a circuit board to the next. A through via goes all the way through. A blind via is hidden within internal layers inside of a board)
Where I think this could be really cool is masking out vias and having your microbe drill for you over time. Surprisingly a large part of a PCB’s cost is tungsten drill bits. It’s still the fastest and most accurate way to drill fiberglass for forming vias but it’s slow when you need to do hundreds or thousands per board. For extremely small vias the bits get insanely expensive and fragile too.
Yeah I’m not clear about the scales. The article I linked talks about 1-3nm scale quantum dots semiconductors. I think the scale also influence performance like clock rate and waste heat production. So this idea might just be impossible, or only viable for pretty large and slow devices. For microcontrollers it might be enough though. And this might be able to make use of 3D better than lithography and be more compact.
I do imagine that biological cells could become the real “nanobots” that could be used for fabrication. Like nanobots might never be real because if they could work they’d already have evolved in nature. But maybe we could program cells to grow in very specific and complex shapes in a vat for fabrication, and different areas turn into different colors and material properties. This kinda must be possible. An alternative to injection molded plastics. PCBs could definitely work, although there might be a reason why they stick with fiberglass if the drill bits cost so much lol. I can also imagine this for “organ 3D printing”.