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November 12, 2013, 07:19:38 AM |
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I work as an electronics designer and I can tell you getting PCB's made is dead easy and cheap these days. There's lots of really cheap PCB manufacturers are out there with turn-key service for incredibly low prices - I routinely do projects where the one-off PCB is one of the cheapest parts even though it's custom and I'm only buying 2-3 of them. Good Bitcoin ASICs shouldn't need much routing, so you could probably even get away with 2 layer boards, and these days 4 layer isn't such a big deal. (which it doesn't look like that printer can do anyway)
The other issue is that for an ASIC implementation, indeed almost any serious circuit, having your PCB made out of a "conductive" 3d printed material just isn't good enough - you need real copper. Again, this is especially important for ASIC designs where you want actual copper to both get current into the chips efficiently, and conduct heat away.
Having said that if someone can add that conductive material to a fully 3d printer there's some really interesting uses for 3d circuits to solve all kinds of packaging problems; last I checked those applications are still being held back by the stupidly high cost of prototyping them. (it also doesn't help that the CAD tools are immature and expensive)
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