Computer Chips Made of Wood Promise Greener Electronics 128
alphadogg writes: Researchers in the U.S. and China have developed semiconductor chips that are almost entirely made out of a wood-derived material. In addition to being biodegradable, the cost of production is much less than conventional semiconductors. According to the NetworkWorld report: "The researchers used a cellulose material for the substrate of the chip, which is the part that supports the active semiconductor layer. Taken from cellulose, a naturally abundant substance used to make paper, cellulose nanofibril (CNF) is a flexible, transparent and sturdy material with suitable electrical properties. That makes CNF better than alternative chip designs using natural materials such as paper and silk, they argue in a paper published in the journal Nature Communications."
HCF joke in 3...2...1... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:HCF joke in 3...2...1... (Score:4, Funny)
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Will Apples be made of wormwood?
I'm sorry Mr. Johnson, your computer has termites.
Re: HCF joke in 3...2...1... (Score:2)
Apples will be made from applewood.
Wormwood fibre would surely lead to electronic hallucination.
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I thought that was how the reality distortion field worked?!?
Computers Kill Trees (Score:2)
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Paper-production is actually pushing humans to plant more trees, and that trees act as carbon sinks. Killing a tree is not a huge problem since you immediatly replace it
Re:Computers Kill Trees (Score:4)
Re:Computers Kill Trees (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Computers Kill Trees (Score:4, Informative)
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You probably get more CO2 sequestered in the first 20 years than the next 80.
More carbon sequestered, less biodiversity. Sounds like a great deal - at least in the short term.
Re: Computers Kill Trees (Score:1)
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Re:Computers Kill Trees (Score:5, Informative)
For the highest amount of CO2 sequestration you need the plant matter to fall into an anaerobic bog and slowly sink into the ground as new stuff lands on top. After a few hundred million years, an advanced society then digs it as coal and oil and burns it, dumping all the carbon back into the atmosphere.
There's a huge amount of stored carbon in the ground. It's only a problem when you burn it. Burn current plant matter and and you're only returning the carbon that came from the air recently, not the carbon that's been saved up for millions of years.
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Your EPA document is about sequestration rates PER TREE in (sub)urban setting. Under such circumstances, the CO2 sequestration rate would depend mostly on the amount of sunlight that it can capture, which increases as the tree grows. A typical urban tree looks like a short stick with a strongly branched green ball on top.
In a production forest, trees are planted closely together and compete with each other for light. You'd expect the photosynthesis rate per unit of ground area to level off once a full leaf
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For the highest carbon sequestration we should plant trees with wood that sinks in salt water and then dump the wood in a deep part of the ocean. The wood would sink to the bottom where it does not rot and thus does not release the CO2 to the water.
(some checking by an actual researcher in a relevant field required)
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So what changes do you think you would make to the ecosystem of the deep ocean by dumping all that energy rich material in it?
Of course you could also convert it in charcoal and bury that that in desert areas.
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Not actually true. As part owner of a tree farm we've looked into carbon credits, etc. CO2 sequestration is highest in the first few years of growth and then gradually tapers off.
What? This is an outright lie. I just covered this here recently, and the precise opposite is true. Mature trees fix more CO2 than young trees. Mature forest fixes more CO2 than young forest. I first found that this was true for Sequoia Sempervirens, but I dug around and found that this was true for the vast majority of trees. You can read the majority of my comments on this subject in the discussion reakthrough In Artificial Photosynthesis Captures CO2 In Acetate [slashdot.org]. As I recall, there was another discussion
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Feel free to come to my farm and bring your measuring tape and hypsometer.
I don't have to; I can read and other people have done the studies for me, as you can see in the links I posted in the prior discussion. People with credibility, unlike yourself. People who have actually done peer-reviewed studies, unlike yourself. I don't fall into the fallacy of thinking I'm smarter than everyone — that's why I looked it up.
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the habitats provided by older trees are much harder to replace.
these have an effect on wider parts of the environment such as keeping soil in place or supporting other flora and fauna. This can have much wider effects that are very hard to gauge.
also not all trees have the same effect on the nutrients in the soil around them , replanted trees tend to be the ones that grow fast but do not necessarily compliment their surroundings as much as their predecessors and often deplete them. Most woodlands are a div
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Sure, but paper-production forest do not contain 100 years old trees. The idea is to plant trees somewhere there were no tree before.
Or at least, where there are no trees currently
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Sure, but paper-production forest do not contain 100 years old trees. The idea is to plant trees somewhere there were no tree before.
Or at least, where there are no trees currently
the northeast (connecticut, to be specific) is relatively well forested these days. the thing is, this is not the old forests from preColombian days, this is largely new forest maybe 100 years old, from when the agricultural areas gained by destroying the old forests were abandoned or converted to residential areas and suburbia. more scrubby than magnificent huge trees, if you see a 30 foot oak or red maple it's a grand and mighty entity, that kind of thing. not sure if that counts as carbon sequestration o
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if you cut a 100years old tree, and replant it, the new trees is not gonna sink as much carbon as the previous tree.
I don't know much, but I would imagine that if that tree is turned into paper, furniture etc., (most of) the carbon stays "sunk" in that product - until it is burned, at only this point the carbon returns to the atmosphere as CO2. So, Regularly cutting trees and making something out of them (even compost), while replanting the area with new trees, might actually be better in terms of carbon sequestration, than just leaving the trees stand ad infinitum.
Brings a new meaning to rule 34 (Score:2)
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If the computer has wood.
well, the internet, you know...
Stupid (Score:5, Insightful)
So they replace the substrate with wood ... instead of silica ... the argument being that wood is plentiful and biodegradable and biologically safe ...
Except ... Silica is more plentiful and more biologically safe since its essentially biologically inert.
As an advantage, silica is NOT biodegradable, because I want my chips to last, not fall apart over the winter when it sheds its leaves.
Silica is NOT the issue for the environment in CPUs, its the production materials and doping agents that are horrible on living things and hard to dispose of.
So congrats ... you solved a problem ... wait, no, you didn't really do anything productive. Not seeing any redeeming quality about a chip produced this way and seeing plenty of down sides.
Whats next, you're going to try and convince me that the aircraft carrier made of sawdust and ice they tried to construct during WWII really was a brilliant plant for a warship sailing in the south pacific?
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don't be so hasty, hipsters and lumbersexuals need to promote something they understand, ie. not heavy chemistry.
I'm researching organic data integration and processing devices, made of organic materials, largely proteins suspended in solutions and gels, powered by oxidation of simple carbohydrates. Rather than purely electrically, signals will be transferred by a hybrid chemical/electrical process involving transfer of ions between compartments of conducting saline solutions, isolated by nonconducting layers of hydrocarbons, with said transfer both dependent on and altering the electric potentials.
Data will be pro
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Except ... Silica is more plentiful and more biologically safe since its essentially biologically inert.
Also, silica conducts heat far better than cellulose, which means it can be made small, dense, and fanless, requiring less power and consuming fewer resources overall.
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Just sayin, with a wood processor you could have a truly native HCF instruction.
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Just sayin, with a wood processor you could have a truly native HCF instruction.
No longer would autocorrect have to fix "wood processor".
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and won't burst into flames if it goes over 451 degrees Fahrenheit!
and bugs don't eat it.
upgrade ready (Score:2)
but what if I want to put my smartphone in the paper-shredder when I'm done with it? [when Apple releases a new model]
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You're the sort of person who screams at the TV, or gets angry at talkback radio. There aren't any foundries gearing up for wood chips. It's just an interesting piece of materials science. Imagine some sort of genetic engineering that could grow a cellulose structure with semi-conducting channels. Then go take a cold shower.
Now that you mention it,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Slayman CL, Long WS, Gradmann D (1976). "Action potentials in Neurospora crassa , a mycelial fungus". Biochimica et Biophysica Acta 426 (4): 737–744. doi:10.1016/0005-2736(76)90138-3. PMID 130926.
Mummert H, Gradmann D (1991). "Action potentials in Acetabularia: measurement and simulation of voltage-gated fluxes". Journal of Membrane Biology 124 (3): 265–273. doi:10.1007/BF01994359. PMID 1664861.
Re:Stupid (Score:5, Interesting)
Except that this substrate is not being used for Si based semiconductors, but for GaAs instead. Also, using the wood-based substrate means that you can use 99% less of the semiconductor material (GaAs which is rarer than Si, and also poisonous). This will make specific classes of electronic devices (specifically radio and microwave frequency devices) much cheaper, and much less hazardous to dispose of, which is a big win.
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Except that this substrate is not being used for Si based semiconductors, but for GaAs instead
Apart from that, there is the whole, emerging, organic and printable semiconductor industry:
http://www2.physics.ox.ac.uk/r... [ox.ac.uk]
http://www.fastcompany.com/114... [fastcompany.com]
These things are not necessarily meant for servers or even consumer electronics as we know it; there is a huge number of things that different industries are interested in using computer technology for, where things like price, flexibility and low power consumption are crucial factors. Just imagine if it were possible to print something like thousands
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... CPUs are small enough that they don't need to be flexable, the CPU is not that big hunk of a thing you pull out of the socket, thats the package, and it has to be big and string to hold all those pins or balls in the right place under the pressure of the lock on the socket. The CPU is a little chip inside of there with wires connected to it so small that you can't see them without good vision or assistance.
Also, silica doesn't require or create toxic chemicals by working with it, had you bothered to r
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Also, silica doesn't require or create toxic chemicals by working with it, had you bothered to read my statement, you'd see that its the doping agents that make the silica actually do something other than not conduct electricity that come with all the toxic effects.
Doping agents like Phosphine [wikipedia.org] and etching fluids like hydrofluoric acid [wikipedia.org]. Yes. Very nice stuff.
You can handle them safely but it requires attention to detail from everyone: engineer that designs the system, the mechanic that welds the double walled piping, everyone that can acces the valves, the controller that sees the notifications and everyone that can see a potential problem.
I have designed such tubing systems.
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Re:Stupid (Score:4, Interesting)
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The aircraft carrier made of sawdust and ice was to be used in the north atlantic, where it would be subject to u-boat attacks. Not in the tropics.
"We have sighted the Titanic, captain"
"Full steam ahead! Ramming speed!"
Need to apply thought (Score:2)
Thus you need to consider more than one little bit, which is the easiest bit, of the long chain of effort between sand and CPU or the new material and CPU.
As for the biodegradable rant - it's not cellulose anymore and may be no more biodegradable than many plastics.
The above assumes you are being honest and are merely mistaken.
However I suspect such an embarrassing major error
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Making non-biodegradable stuff from tree-carbon is awesome from a CO2 perspective. It is one of the few ways to get the stuff out of our atmosphere.
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Only if you assign an agenda I have not expressed to a strawman you've built in my name. What is it with petty shit like that?
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Not seeing any redeeming quality about a chip produced this way and seeing plenty of down sides.
The people selling us devices with these chips may see the convenient planned obsolescence as a huge upside.
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RoHS/Lead-free has already baked obsolescence into your consumer electronics. Tin-whiskers plus the difficulty in services devices with lead-free solder, not that VLSI really makes it practical to take your gizmos to the repair shop anymore.
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...
Are you trying to be cute or just ignorant and talking out your ass?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Specifically
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
I.E. Silica is the naturally occurring thing that gets refined into silicon for the substrate.
Great news! (Score:4, Funny)
since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted.
Another advantage of cellulose based wafers is that using traditional Japanese technology, they can be made even smaller, and in pretty shapes like swans.
Re:Great news! (Score:4, Insightful)
since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted.
Indeed. Silicon is already down to only 30% of the earth's crust [wikipedia.org], and aluminum has dwindled to only 8%. We are down to our last few peta-tonnes.
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It is a matter of concentration and processing cost, not the fact that it sits in the same gravity well with us.
Generally I think minitiaturization is great since we can do more with less say rare earth metals or even such metals as copper or gold. The downside is that we are able achive a much finer distribution with it.
I'm going to mark this as facetious... (Score:2)
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"since global ore reserves of current substrates such as silicon and aluminum dioxide are rare and almost depleted."
That could not be more untrue. Pure silica sand (which is silicon dioxide) that is the source of silicon is in such abundance that it sells for less than $50 per ton, after cleaning and grading. The raw material is a minor part of the cost. Aluminum ores such as bauxite are some of the most common minerals on the planet. The USGS actually describes bauxite reserves as "essentially inexhausta
Got any marshmallows? (Score:3)
Read 'Ring World" and you'll know how this ends. (Score:1)
Red Green would be proud. (Score:3)
what? (Score:1)
So... would a foundry based on this tech... (Score:2)
So... would a foundry based on this tech... be a "wood-chipper"?
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Imagine... (Score:5, Funny)
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um.... (Score:2)
Being made out of nature, doesn't make it good for nature.
Oh the puns write themselves (Score:5, Funny)
Landscapers are becoming in demand because of their ability to provide wood chips.
Play Nintendogs, now with more bark.
Search functionality vastly improved for native binary trees.
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Potatoes have cellulose too. I demand potato chips.
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how can you tell your wood based processor is over heating?
By sending it Fahrenheit 451 if it bursts into flame then you know it's too hot.
Fir Yew I Pine and Balsam Too (Score:2)
All termite jokes aside, this could have applications where disposability is a criterion. Those animated greeting cards could now be more annoying than ever before.
Finally, reliable physical combustion of chips! (Score:2)
Also provides an useful indicator whether your overclocked rig is running too hot!
Old school email (Score:2)
Pine FTW!
biodegradeable (Score:3)
gives a whole new meaning to the phrase bit rot
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And would Dutch Elm disease be reclassified as a computer virus or a buffer exploit?
One word: (Score:2)
Bugs. Bugs eat cellulose.
Apologies (Score:1)
I'm contractually obliged to use this every time I can:
Mujo: "I saw a guy with a wooden leg!"
Haso: "That's nothing. I've got an aunt with a cedar chest."
This pleases Bender (Score:1)
"The modern world can bite my splintery wooden ass!"
All natural? (Score:2)
Maybe this will finally shut up the people who complain that eBooks just aren't like the real thing.
Yeah. Alright. (Score:1, Informative)
I read the title and was immediately "No."
Seriously, news like these are not news and misleading titles and vague speculation does not make it any more credible.
I'm feeling confident now that I have purchased (Score:1)
a semiconductor chip made out of wood. I wasn't about to repeat the same mistake when I purchased that semiconductor chip made of straw.
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Computer chips made out of rocks (Score:2)
Overclocking (Score:2)
So does it turn into rocket fuel when it catches fire and you blow a high powered fan on it?
First problem: heat (Score:2)
Wood, and cellulose, are good insulators... of heat, as well. How ya gonna cool the chips? Put layers of cooling tubes through the chips?
mark "man that wood-chip is really burning... I mean, *really* burning.
So what's wrong with Si? (Score:2)
I bet it will work even better (Score:2)
old news with new title (Score:1)
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