Nobody has but developed useful processors that may be mass-produced in billions for lower than a penny every… But when they’re made with plastics, this would possibly really be potential!
The problem is that even probably the most primary industry-standard microcontrollers are too refined to mass-produce on plastic. A analysis crew from the he College of Illinois reveals a easy but totally working plastic processor which may be constructed for pennies. The crew created 4-bit and 8-bit processors with the aim of lowering the scale and growing the share of working built-in circuits produced. In accordance with crew chief Rakesh Kumar, 81% of the 4-bit model operated, which is an efficient sufficient yield to interrupt the one-penny barrier.
The processors his crew created have been produced with indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO), a versatile thin-film semiconductor that may be placed on plastic and nonetheless working even when twisted round a millimetre radius. Whereas a reliable manufacturing methodology is crucial, it was the design that made all of the distinction. As a substitute of adapting an current microcontroller structure to plastic, Kumar’s crew created Flexicore from the bottom up.
The researchers made the processor even less complicated by setting up it to execute an instruction in a single clock cycle somewhat than the multistep pipelines utilized by right now’s CPUs. Then they created logic that reuses elements to implement sure instructions, reducing the gate depend much more.
“On the whole, we have been capable of simplify the design of FlexiCores by tailoring them to the wants of versatile functions, which are usually computationally easy,” says Nathaniel Bleier, Kumar’s pupil. All of this resulted in a 5.6-square-millimeter 4-bit FlexiCore with simply 2,104 semiconductor units (about the identical quantity of transistors as an Intel 4004 from 1971), in comparison with 56,340 for PlasticARM. “It’s an order of magnitude lower than the tiniest silicon microcontrollers when it comes to gate depend,” he says.
