Silicon chips, cost

If we consider the reasonable form of the practical artificial skin system, it is most likely that the pressure data read out from organic integrated circuits would be transferred to silicon chips. In this sense, some readers may want to claim that it is not necessary to build a decoder or selector with organic transistors. The denser and the larger-area integrated circuits, however, require the more complicated packaging and fine wiring, which cannot be easily achieved with silicon at reasonable cost. Thus our opinion is that it is very important to realize func-... 

Examining a typical RFID tag, several points of note are apparent. The first point is that the size of the tag is dominated by the antenna, which is printed at a relatively low resolution the size of the circuitry is a relatively small fraction of the overall tag size. The second point is that the cost scaling of silicon-based RFID is hmited by the cost of attaching the tiny silicon chip to the antenna thus, silicon-based RFID only benefits partially from cost reduction in the silicon microelectronics industry. The third point is that the transistor performance requirements for simple RF barcodes are not outrageous, and are potentially in the range of what is achievable using printed electronics. 

The fabrication of humidity sensors on silicon chips has recently become possible using 1C. production technology [37, 49], This realizes a small, low cost humidity sensor, and makes it possible to integrate the humidity sensor with other sensors or signal-handling circuitry on the same chip. A new integrated temperature and humidity sensor developed by Yamamoto et al., consists of a polymer capacitor on the p-n diode of a temperature sensor [50] as illustrated in Figure 20-33. A thin film of polyimide is used as the moisture-sensitive material... 

The causes of this impasse derive from the peculiar physical and economic laws that govern the design of ICs. The most celebrated of these laws stipulates that as transistors or other components are made smaller and are packed more densely on the surface of a silicon chip, the cost of producing the chip remains nearly constant, so much so that the number of transistors on a state-of-the-art chip doubles every year or two, as already alluded to. In effect, the cost per transistor steadily declines over time. This extraordinary fact is the basis of Moore s law, formulated in 1965 by Gordon E. Moore, one of the founders of the Intel Corporation. The law reflects the fantastic progression of circuit fabrication that has unleashed previously unimagined computational power. ... 

The number of circuits which can be placed on one silicon "chip" is restricted by the difficulty of keeping the wafer of silicon bonded to its ceramic substrate as it heats up. At present, the most frequently used packaging material is alumina which has a thermal expansion coefficient, nearly twice that of silicon. Differential expansion between the silicon and its substrate is containable in current packages but the manufacturers want to move to larger circuits, for faster computers and to reduce size and cost of the overall equipment, so differences in expansion set a limit on how large the circuits can be. The semiconductor companies have a real need for a substrate material with thermal expansion similar to that of silicon. (Table 3)... 

A single linear quadrupole provides no MS/MS capabilities but a triple quadrupole instrument is the most versatile of all tandem instruments (Section 6.2.2). Other major advantages of quadrupole instruments are their ease-of-use (high) and cost (low), as well as their small size. Indeed, a remarkable miniaturized quadrupole etched on a silicon chip (Geear 2005), with rods of diameter 0.5 mm and length 30 mm, yielded unit mass RP up to m/z 400. 

A lightning strike caused a fire in a Phillips electronics semi-conductor facility in New Mexico in March 2000. Millions of silicon chips used in mobile phones manufactured by Ericsson and Nokia were damaged. Nokia reacted quickly to the disruption by going to a backup supplier and production returned to normal in 3 weeks. Phillips was the sole supplier to Ericsson and Ericsson s production of mobile phones was affect for several weeks, which resulted in 640 million loss in 2000 and the eventual loss of the North American mobile phone market. Nokia s market share increased by 30% (Christopher and Peck, 2004). The US West Coast ports lockout affected 29 ports and lasted 11 days. The lockout caused an estimated ll- 22 billion in lost sales, cost of airfreight and spoilage. 

The power of PEDOT is its ability to be transformed from a conductor to an insulator by regulating the current which flows through it. The new technology system, which stores more data at less cost than expensive-to-build silicon chips, permits writing once only but allows reading many times. 

Widmer and colleagues in 1990, in which silicon chip analyzers which incorporate sample pretreatment, separation and detection played a fundamental role [9]. The advantages of microchip analysis include the ability to analyze minute samples, speed of analysis, reduced cost and waste and portability. Ever since, the p.TAS has drawn a huge amount of attention and researchers have been attempting to incorporate a microdialysis-based continuous sampling component. Some of the devices which have been fabricated are shown in Fig. 4. 

Betthauer et al. (2011) developed a novel integrated silicon chip fuel cell type of accumulator that is based on nonprecious metals only. The key component of this accumulator is a low-cost AB2-type hydrogen storage electrode. The accumulator has an OCV of 0.81 V and develops a maximum power density of 0.66 mW/cm —comparable or even superior to former precious metal-based cells. 

The growth in the semicon industry has relied on the manufacturing advancement of silicon chip fabrication factories (fab) which can easily exceed two billion dollars in construction costs. Precision of assembly, contamination control (purity), automation, and speed are some of the key contributing factors to the improved productivity of fabs. Consequently, every year more computation power is packed in smaller processors, shrinking device sizes, and lower cost to consumers. 

According to the international technology roadmap for semiconductors, chips with a wafer diameter of450 mm and a feature size of 0.05 /xm by 2011 will serve to decrease manufacturing costs [29]. In the integrated circuit (IC) manufacture process as shown in Fig. 21 [30], dielectric stacks have been formed by the ion etching on the coating of dielectric material formed on the silicon surface (Fig. 21 (a)). 

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