Sunday, January 1, 2012

Transistor Made From Cotton Yarn

From the summary: "think of how many thousands of interconnections are in every piece of cotton clothing ? you could make a fairly powerful computer!""

There aren't that many connections. Assume a 200 thread count fabric, since it's both typical and makes the math easy. That thread count means in each square inch of fabric, you have 100 vertical threads and 100 horizontal, for a total of 10k crossings. To replicate just the old 100 MHz Pentium 1 processor (hardly what anyone would call a powerful computer), you'd need over two square feet of this stuff. If you want something decent, like what you might get in a modern smartphone, you'll need anywhere from ten to a hundred times that much. And remember that it won't run anywhere near the speeds of the IC, and that we haven't even allowed space for all the other essential bits of a computer (e.g. memory). If you want a powerful computer in your shirt, you're much better off sewing something tiny into the hem. Even then, the weight of the battery will be obnoxious.

Still very cool technology, but I see it being used for simpler distributed systems (like the mentioned sensors) rather than a fabric computer.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/vTWHzUrxP0I/transistor-made-from-cotton-yarn

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