We’ve been talking about wearable computers for a long time. A. Long. Time [2]. But computer hardware has remained, well, hard. I mean, it’s made out of rock, fer goodness sake!
Thus summer the clever elves down the street at Electrical and Computer Engineering report a demonstration of actually useful flexible computers [3]. These tiny 4-bit and 8-bit processors (welcome to 1970!) are fabricated on plastic rather than silicon, which makes them flexible.
Now, electronics have been produced on plastic, but only in small numbers. The Illinois design was able to fabricate hundreds, with a high enough yield to promise a price of a penny or less. (The research paper has a section reporting “Yield Analysis”—this is the real deal.) This would make them usable in all kinds of disposable and wearable applications, e.g., “smart” bandages, food packaging, who know what?
This breakthrough comes from the simplified design of the chip logic [1]. Rather than trying to produce contemporary 32-bit or 64-bit processors, with complex pipelines and functions, these processors are throwbacks to the good old days when the world was young and gates were expensive and difficult, so we made the most of a few components.
Super cool.
But this is from my old Alma Mater, so there’s much, much more.
For one thing, the processors (hundreds of them!) were tested with seven mini-applications, because these chips are actually programmable. Obviously, they wrote their own assembler for these one of a kind chips, because this is Illinois and we know how to write software tools. This made it possible to do some actual testing and benchmarking. (There is a section, “Comparison to Existing Flexible Processors”!)
But wait! There’s more!
They also explored optimization of the design. They built design tools (naturally!) make it possible to optimize the chip design for different problems. Essentially working backwards from the code to build optimal chips to run it. Awesome!
Very well done, all!
1. Nathaniel Bleier, Calvin Lee, Francisco Rodriguez, Antony Sou, Scott White, and Rakesh Kumar, FlexiCores: low footprint, high yield, field reprogrammable flexible microprocessors, in Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 2022, Association for Computing Machinery: New York, New York. p. 831–846. https://doi.org/10.1145/3470496.3527410
2. Samuel K. Moore, The First High-Yield, Sub-Penny Plastic Processor, in IEEE Spectrum – Semiconductors, June 14, 2022. https://spectrum.ieee.org/plastic-microprocessor
- Nathaniel Bleier, Calvin Lee, Francisco Rodriguez, Antony Sou, Scott White, and Rakesh Kumar, FlexiCores: low footprint, high yield, field reprogrammable flexible microprocessors, in Proceedings of the 49th Annual International Symposium on Computer Architecture. 2022, Association for Computing Machinery: New York, New York. p. 831–846. https://doi.org/10.1145/3470496.3527410
- K. Van Laerhoven and O. Cakmakci. What shall we teach our pants? In Digest of Papers. Fourth International Symposium on Wearable Computers, 2000, 77-83. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/888468
- Samuel K. Moore, The First High-Yield, Sub-Penny Plastic Processor, in IEEE Spectrum – Semiconductors, June 14, 2022. https://spectrum.ieee.org/plastic-microprocessor
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