A
Adam Megacz
Guest
Forgive me if this is the wrong newsgroup for this.
Has anybody every tried making/selling an "[anti]fuse programmable"
printed circuit board?
The idea would be like Actel's antifuse-based FPGAs at a board scale:
you have a mesh of wires connected by fuses (or antifuses). You
destructively program the device by asserting high voltages on the
appropriate wire pairs to break (make) connections through fuses
(antifuses).
In the PCB situation you'd probably want all the fuses on the surface
on one side of the board, and several layers of wiring (six?). The
programming network would need two copper layers of its own (probably
the fuse side and the layer beneath that).
If this actually worked, hobbyists would be able to make reasonably
complex mulit-layer PCBs without an investment in machinery or having
to deal with a third-party manufacturer. I guess the question is
whether or not you can make and mount an array of that many
[anti]fuses cheaply enough (or even somehow create them using the same
expose/etch process used for the copper, but with a different
material). Obviously it would also depend on the electrical quality
of the blown antifuses (or unblown fuses) and how small/many you could
make.
Anyways, either this is completely nuts, or else somebody's already
done it. I suspect the former, but I figured people here would know
which is the case.
Here's Actel's product, which is basically the same thing at VLSI
scales:
http://www.actel.com/products/axcelerator/
- a
--
PGP/GPG: 5C9F F366 C9CF 2145 E770 B1B8 EFB1 462D A146 C380
Has anybody every tried making/selling an "[anti]fuse programmable"
printed circuit board?
The idea would be like Actel's antifuse-based FPGAs at a board scale:
you have a mesh of wires connected by fuses (or antifuses). You
destructively program the device by asserting high voltages on the
appropriate wire pairs to break (make) connections through fuses
(antifuses).
In the PCB situation you'd probably want all the fuses on the surface
on one side of the board, and several layers of wiring (six?). The
programming network would need two copper layers of its own (probably
the fuse side and the layer beneath that).
If this actually worked, hobbyists would be able to make reasonably
complex mulit-layer PCBs without an investment in machinery or having
to deal with a third-party manufacturer. I guess the question is
whether or not you can make and mount an array of that many
[anti]fuses cheaply enough (or even somehow create them using the same
expose/etch process used for the copper, but with a different
material). Obviously it would also depend on the electrical quality
of the blown antifuses (or unblown fuses) and how small/many you could
make.
Anyways, either this is completely nuts, or else somebody's already
done it. I suspect the former, but I figured people here would know
which is the case.
Here's Actel's product, which is basically the same thing at VLSI
scales:
http://www.actel.com/products/axcelerator/
- a
--
PGP/GPG: 5C9F F366 C9CF 2145 E770 B1B8 EFB1 462D A146 C380