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Tech.Picts page 2

Semiconductor 'Inks'

picture included below

Semiconducting substrates are developed that can be mixed with a solvent so they can be applied in liquid form. P-type and N-type 'inks' are made with many different electronic characteristics. Instead of using lasers and electron beams in vacuums to etch and deposit layers of semiconductors on chips of ultra-pure silicon, the semiconducting inks can be simply printed onto a piece of paper, package, box or even on the product itself. As the amount 'ink' required to make an integrated circuit is so small, they can even be eaten after being invisibly printed onto foodstuffs!

The single greatest use of the semiconductor ink printed 'chipped in' product was to interface it to the World.Telco's public.net. A product's position, condition, and use, monitored so that the product can be given a virtual reality, animated, graphical overlay.

Take a safesmoke vaporstick, for example. A vaporstick always looks the same, on or off. No smoke or glowing end, just a nondescript tube. So, you're at your favorite barnet wanting to look cool. You tell your personal.net you want big billowing clouds of purple smoke with red sparkles. You want it to crackle, hiss and emit showers of sparks when you puff on it. And, so it happens, the light and sound show is perfectly presented to the eye and earwear controlled senses of everyone in your area, including you.

picture of 
safesmoke vaporstick

How does this all happen? Your personal.net tells the barnet to VR your safesmoke vaporstick as you described. As everyone in the barnet sees and hears your safesmoke through their eyeware and earware the barnet simply pixels in your vaporstick the way you want it. Video and audio follows the position of your vaporstick and monitors it level of use through reports sent by photon tech powered semiconductor ink tech printed onto the outside of the safe-smoke vapor stick.

There you are, your public.persona for the evening VR'd into the barnet as a net.gladiator.hero, looking too cool, puffing away in a haze of purple smoke drinking what appears to be an ever overflowing gold goblet of red wine which is in reality a plastic tumbler of alcohol mixed with wine flavor, laced with nano-sensors reporting your intake of alcohol to the personal.net. Later, by using tiny little remote-controlled release-capsules of anti-alk which were floating invisibly in your gold goblet the personal.net can keep you from exceeding the max.lim of alcohol ingestion as mandated by the insurance.net.

Literally everything is chipped into the World.Telco's world-spanning personal.net. Consequently, everyone is constantly, monitored by the World.TelCo.

To talk about just in time inventory. With edible semiconductor ink printed tell-tale circuits on everything ever made, the World.Telco and insurance.net could tell what you ate. How fast you ate it. How much you ate, and what you did with the leftovers and packaging.

Pages in paperbooks, which never went out of style, came to have a life of their own. Everything with a printed package could talk and play animated pictures. Simply pick up an item, it's printed chips would talk with your personal.net interface in your mandatory personal.phone incorporated into your fibersuit. Watch out or it would quickly collect payment, and then send a note along to the company to restock the shelf.

For details of what the 'chipped in' world might be like, read the Future.Novel.

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Copyright (c) 1996 Lee Skidmore