Bioplastic Based IC chips (Page 1 of 2)

I'd be curious to know if the bioplastic will fit their required tolerances and mechanical properties. Not to mention that making ICs is already extremely resource hungry and has razor thin margins, and even if bioplastic is only a few milli-cents more expensive per unit, it could totally ruin their margins and make producing new chips impossible.

Yes, but hipsters are far, faaaar more likely to buy organic free-fange grown-on-an-old-warehouse-roof-in-NYC potato chips than bulk bioplastic-cased ICs. And bulk is where it's at. If Jameco or Foxconn won't buy 10,000,000 pieces for their warehouse, you can bet TI won't bother making 'em, because you literally have to make them in those quantities to sell them. And they just spent years switching entire product lines to ROHS. I'm telling you, it won't happen.

I think there is a different possibility:

A 3rd party vendor could buy the TI chips as bare dies, and bond them to their own housings. I highly doubt TI would ever do it in-house, but it might be possible to make some kind of hipstery organic IC line that way. Maybe, kinda, sorta. Except die-bonding machines are a mind-blowingly massive capitol investment. Like, buying jet airplanes expensive.

My cynical, non-scientific hunch is that it being packaged in bio-plastic would only make you feel better about buying products that have much worse effects on the world than being packaged in tiny bits of plastic. Besides the plastic, loads of dangerous chemicals are used in manufacturing them, loads of water and energy is being spent, and I bet many of them are stuffed with rare minerals from DRC.

while using bioplastics might be a cool idea, I think this is really a minor problem.
The biggest problem right now is that the way the economy works, makes it almost impossible to produce anything that might be somehow sustainable for the planet. The rate at which electronic devices are made and thrown away is probably the main problem.
If we all could keep our phones (just to name one of the most short-lived devices) for 10 years or more, a lot less of the chemicals used in the production of these would end up in landfills and water supply. Then of course all the big companies like Samsung, Apple, HTC, youname it, would not be able to make enourmous profit on phone sales.
But then again, why should a company make profit in the first place? I mean if you think about it, what should the aim of a company be? I think it should be to turn resources (material, human, intellectual... whatever) into a value for society. Companies should exist with the aim to improve everybody's lives. Be it by producing goods that people need (food, tools and so on) or goods that make our lives just a bit more fun and interesting, money should not be the aim but one of the tools you use to create this greater good.

If you see economy from that point of view everything starts to make sense. Money get's used to make better producs, to have the necessary resources to produce them, to have the best people working on them and so on. Everybody earns money and has a much bigger profit from what the company does than just money. And all these paradoxes we experience today would not make any sense any more.

It's an utopian vision I know... but on a purely logical level, it totally makes sense. And you start to realize that the main problem we have is just that our economy is kind of working upside down...

Last edited by rumpelfilter (Feb 7, 2014 3:55 pm)

The plastic used in ICs is typically an epoxy resin, as opposed to a thermoplastic. A thermoplastic will melt and solidify with temperature, whereas as an epoxy will set through a chemical reaction and won't melt. They are also mechanically rigid, excellent electrical insulators, anhydrous  and chemically inert, all of which are anywhere between highly desirable and required features for devices used in production of electronics. Now, the problem is that most or all bioplastics are thermoplastics. This is great for 3D printing, but not so great for chips.

For example, you'd be hard pressed to find a bioplastic which has a high enough melting point to tolerate soldering which will reach a minimum of 200 ºC for reflow soldering, more for other methods, including manual soldering with a soldering iron.
Other problems that I would predict: Poor bonding to the die and bond wires, which will let moisture creep in and destroy the die. Poor heat conductivity. Might melt or otherwise react with the die and destroy it. Might melt from the heat generated by the die and become a good enough conductor on the microscopic level to create faults. Might have unsuitable dielectric properties and leak high frequency signals between different  nearby traces on the die.

But the kicker is that the tiny amount of plastic used in the production of a chip i probably the least of the problems environmentally speaking. A typical consumer product will contain in the order of hundreds to thousands amount the plastic used in the chip in the case. Producing the die requires the use of various nasty chemicals, for example trichloroethylene which is used for washing the die. Any serious manufacturer will keep their trichloroethylene in a closed loop system, but to mention a famous example, there was a leak in the facilities of MOS Technology, Commodore's chip plant, which forced the city to build a water pipeline from a nearby city because the groundwater was ruined. How do the less scrupulous Chinese IC manufacturers dispose of their chemicals I wonder?

But my bottom line, and this may perhaps sound a bit hostile, is that you can't just slap a buzzword onto an industrial process. If something hasn't been tried it's often because it's not a good idea.

I'm with you on this, but I think it's probably more economical/realistic to start small.

Solar-powered DMG perhaps?