I wonder if it’s technically possible to grow electronics in a vat or tray using biological cells that have the entire schematic encoded into their DNA. Some kind of biology that can grow copper traces and organic semiconductors in a sugar soup. And then dies and leaves a PCB or integrated circuit behind. Maybe much slower but much larger chips where you can just fill some trays with activated goop and let them grow for a week into “compucilium”.
Then you could design the DNA for such biomanufacturers and just sell it in ketchup packets for people to grow their own computers. Just add sugar and water and mix well lol. This would truly “democratize” electronics.
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.
I wonder if it’s technically possible to grow electronics in a vat or tray using biological cells that have the entire schematic encoded into their DNA. Some kind of biology that can grow copper traces and organic semiconductors in a sugar soup. And then dies and leaves a PCB or integrated circuit behind. Maybe much slower but much larger chips where you can just fill some trays with activated goop and let them grow for a week into “compucilium”.
Then you could design the DNA for such biomanufacturers and just sell it in ketchup packets for people to grow their own computers. Just add sugar and water and mix well lol. This would truly “democratize” electronics.
Not sure if such a thing can exist but bio-computing is already a thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_computing
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.