It's a cliche that PCB and microprocessors look like aerial
views of cities, so this has that issue, but I hope I've done
something new with it.
Design a city with enormously wide power cables clearly
visible from the air along with junctions to those power
cables which work as relays or storage
capacitors, the
former wired together in such a way as to implement logic
gates. The top surface of everything in the city is painted
with contrasting paint and a literal outline of a component
which if realised in conductor plus insulator form would
work as the component it actually contains.
The components are buildings with continuous stripes of
contrasting colour down their walls which glow in the dark
or not according to whether they are insulators or
conductors. These join directly into an underslung
monorail transit system which is similarly painted on top
accordingly.
The entire city works as a CPU which happens to
implement a program which controls various aspects of the
city such as transport, utilities, stock control and logistics.
At night, the city lights up in strips rather than the usual
street lighting. This enables it to be photographed aerially
using old-fashioned silver compound emulsion type
techniques. If the photograph is then processed in the
right way, it will become a functional network of silver
wires on a plate which will itself function as an identical
CPU to the city itself.
There are a number of problems with this:
* I've been vague about the nature of the contrasting
colours. I've mentioned glowing, street lighting and so
forth, and I don't like that I've done that because it's made
it too vague.
* I'm not sure whether a method really exists whereby a
photographic emulsion can be completely converted to
metal plus insulating gaps. I do, however, think the
surface of the emulsion should be glassy rather than
crystalline.
* Only one layer of circuitry is possible, unlike a
conventional microprocessor.
* I'm not at all sure if silver in particular or any single layer
of metal can be used to realise electronic components. I'm
more or less confident it can be used to make capacitors
but the rest seems a bit implausible. In particular relays,
valves and transistors are all ruled out because there are
no moving parts, no evacuation, no ferromagnetism and no
semiconductors. Having said that, I wonder if a
photography technique could be developed that deposits
semiconductors, or whether that actually exists in the form
of however they make chips.