Print your own circuit boards!

A supra-molecular chemist working at the Hebrew University if Jerusalem has come up with a striking new way of producing circuit board designs. Rather than make the things smaller and smaller, however, Andrew Shipway was curious to see what advances

A supra-molecular chemist working at the Hebrew University if Jerusalem has come up with a striking new way of producing circuit board designs. Rather than make the things smaller and smaller, however, Andrew Shipway was curious to see what advances he could make by scaling the technology up, rather than down. The end product of Shipway's research is a sheet of paper that can be inserted into a normal 600dpi printer, then dunked into a chemical solution - wait ten minutes and you have an instant circuit board.

The paper that Shipway has devised is saturated with palladium nanoparticles, and a circuit designers can print their designs in negative on the paper before soaking it in a copper sulphate-based solution. The copper builds up over the non-ink portions of the paper, and so forms copper wires.

While the process limits the size of the circuits produced, and thus their power, the time advantage more than makes up for that particular shortfall. Normal circuit board manufacture takes up to 24 hours, and involves some truly heinous chemicals. The other possible advantage is that while the output of this method may not stand up to actual use, it certainly allows for a much faster turnaround on testing cycles for future board designs.

And I bet you could make some really interesting paper planes, as well.