Thursday, July 11, 2013

Commodities: Indium, Used to Make iPhones Touch Sensitive, is in Short Supply

The story says supplies will "run out" in the next decade but don't take that literally.
As far as I know we have run out of only one natural resource.
From GigaOm:


Summary: Industry experts are racing to produce the next big conductive coating. They presented on materials like carbon nanotubes and graphene at the annual Semicon West conference today.
No, iPhone screens are not magic. They are coated in a transparent material called indium tin oxide that senses when a finger makes contact.

ITO comes from the metal indium, which must be mined. Prices are rising as it becomes more scarce; the U.S. government estimates that from 2010 to 2011, the cost for indium rose by 25 percent. The world could run out altogether in the next decade.

To keep costs down, electronics manufacturers will need to look to alternative materials. At the Semicon West conference Wednesday in San Francisco, industry experts reported on potential alternatives such as carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires that could someday become the dominant touchscreen coating.
During his presentation, Nanotech Biomachines CEO and CTO Will Martinez presented the audience with a transparent sheet covered in graphene — an emerging material made of a one-atom-thick layer of carbon atoms. He bent it back and forth to demonstrate its flexibility.

 “Try this with ITO and ITO would be filled with cracks,” he said....MORE
And what, gentle reader asks warily, is the one natural resource we've run out of?
Guano.