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3D Printed Computer
Date: 2013-08-04
Tags: 3d-printing computer
Once a 3D-printed semiconductor (e.g.: transistors and diodes), resistors, capacitors, inductor, and possibly memristors are possible, it’ll be (obviously) possible to print circuits, including a computer. Due to the size of such printed components, the circuits will be bulky and it’ll therefor be imperative that such circuits be as space-efficient as possible. Early microprocessors had very low transistor counts. The PDP-8/S had 519 logic gates (Not sure of the exact transistor count, but probably around 2k) and the 4004 had 2,250 transistors. There are designs such as the MCPU that has under 100 gates as well.
My question then becomes what’s the program size to processor complexity ratio? Could a simple 1- or 4- instruction computer, with only a hundred gates, require many times more memory than they save in the processor gate count?