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Plastic Processors for Less Than a Penny Apiece

posted by hubie on Friday June 17 2022, @11:23PM   
from the chip-for-everybody-and-everything dept.

upstart writes:

Researchers design cheap plastic processor that could usher in the age of truly ubiquitous electronics:

If you've been following statistics about the Internet of Things (IoT), which is growing by billions of devices every year, the numbers are pretty mind-boggling. But the truth is that expensive silicon chips are actually holding this rampant growth back.

But now researchers have designed a new plastic processor, which they estimate will be able to be mass-produced for less than a penny. That's right — the new Flexicore chips could kick-start a world in which everything — from bandages to bananas — could have a chip, according to a report by IEEE Spectrum.

The chip designs we currently use — even for the most basic microcontrollers — are too complex to be mass-produced in plastic: You surely won't see a plastic processor on our list of best CPUs for gaming. [...]

To address the peculiarities of plastic chip design, the University of Illinois team built the new Flexicore processor design from scratch. Because yields dive when processor gate count rise, they decided to make a minimal design that reduced the gate count and used 4-bit and 8-bit logic instead of 16-bit or 32-bit alternatives. [...]

A sample 4-bit FlexiCore processor is 5.6mm square and contains 2,104 semiconductor devices, similar to a classic Intel 4004 CPU. [...]

With this sub-penny plastic processor, and the move of flexible electronics from niche to mainstream, we may be seeing the dawn of truly ubiquitous electronics. The above research is going to be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture later this month, so we should learn more about it and further development plans soon.

We speed headlong into our (dystopian?) IoT future.

See also: The First High-Yield, Sub-Penny Plastic Processor

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Original Submission

• Re:3 cent microcontroller Re:3 cent microcontroller (Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @02:20AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18 2022, @02:20AM (#1254135)

  And probably much lower capital costs for creating a production facility, allowing for less expensive customized versions.

  There is absolutely nothing in the article to suggest this could possibly be the case, so this is pure speculation.

  It seems to me that using exotic semiconductor materials is just as likely to result in increased capital outlay rather than the opposite.

  And of course - price. At less than $0.01 there's doubtless a whole lot of potential applications where $0.03 is probably too expensive to justify.

  Yes, making things even cheaper will open up new applications. But I'll believe a $0.01 price point when you can actually buy them at that price point. Right now the $0.01 processor does not actually exist. You can buy the $0.03$0.05 Padauk right now.

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• Re:3 cent microcontroller (Score: 3, Touché) by sgleysti on Saturday June 18 2022, @03:50PM

  by sgleysti (56) on Saturday June 18 2022, @03:50PM (#1254228)

  All of this info is available at the fab's website: https://www.pragmaticsemi.com/ [pragmaticsemi.com]

  Production facility capital costs are lower, processing time is lower, and startup cost for a design is lower, compared to Silicon.

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