lpetrich
Contributor
We all know of computer chips being made with silicon. But plastic? A full-scale CPU has recently been printed on plastic:
Arm researchers have created a flexible 32-bit computer chip made from plastic - SiliconANGLE
noting
A natively flexible 32-bit Arm microprocessor | Nature
It is a
ARM Cortex-M a full-scale 32-bit CPU chip, implementing the ARMv6-M architecture.
It has some on-board memory: 456 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM.
This plastic chip has 56,340 components: 39,157 transistors and 17,183 resistors. This is over 12 times what some previous ones have.
"The microprocessor can be clocked at up to 29 kHz and consumes only 21 mW, which is predominantly (>99%) static power, with the processor accounting for 45%, memories 33% and peripherals 22%."
It almost certainly implements integer addition and subtraction, and likely also multiplication, but not integer division or floating-point operations. It does not have any caches, and it does not support protected memory.
But it's valuable as a proof of concept: that one can make a full-scale CPU on a plastic sheet. Since its power consumption is mostly static, that means that one may be able to speed it up by a factor of at least 100 before dynamic (state-change) effects start dominating the power consumption.
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Silicon is well-known as the material for making computer chips on, but it wasn't the first. History of the transistor - Integrated circuit - Printed circuit board
The first transistors were made with a chemical relative, germanium, until the late 1950's, as were the first integrated circuits, extensions of printed-circuit technology to include printed-on transistors and resistors.
Transistors and computer chips have been made with other materials, like gallium arsenide and silicon carbide, but Si, Ge, GaAs, and SiC are all rigid, and that has provoked interest in plastics.
Arm researchers have created a flexible 32-bit computer chip made from plastic - SiliconANGLE
noting
A natively flexible 32-bit Arm microprocessor | Nature
It is a
ARM Cortex-M a full-scale 32-bit CPU chip, implementing the ARMv6-M architecture.It has some on-board memory: 456 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM.
This plastic chip has 56,340 components: 39,157 transistors and 17,183 resistors. This is over 12 times what some previous ones have.
"The microprocessor can be clocked at up to 29 kHz and consumes only 21 mW, which is predominantly (>99%) static power, with the processor accounting for 45%, memories 33% and peripherals 22%."
It almost certainly implements integer addition and subtraction, and likely also multiplication, but not integer division or floating-point operations. It does not have any caches, and it does not support protected memory.
But it's valuable as a proof of concept: that one can make a full-scale CPU on a plastic sheet. Since its power consumption is mostly static, that means that one may be able to speed it up by a factor of at least 100 before dynamic (state-change) effects start dominating the power consumption.
-
Silicon is well-known as the material for making computer chips on, but it wasn't the first.
History of the transistor - Integrated circuit - Printed circuit boardThe first transistors were made with a chemical relative, germanium, until the late 1950's, as were the first integrated circuits, extensions of printed-circuit technology to include printed-on transistors and resistors.
Transistors and computer chips have been made with other materials, like gallium arsenide and silicon carbide, but Si, Ge, GaAs, and SiC are all rigid, and that has provoked interest in plastics.