Arm’s Cheap and Flexible Plastic Chip Could Create “Internet of Everything”

If you think microchips are everywhere now, appearing in everything from washing machines to streetlights, just wait until circuit boards can be printed on plastic, paper, and fabric for the price of pennies. That’s what chip designer Arm promises, with the company this week unveiling a new plastic-based chip prototype named PlasticARM.

It’s not the first flexible chip we’ve seen, but it’s the most complex. PlasticARM contains a 32-bit Cortex-M0 processor (the cheapest and simplest processor core in Arm’s Cortex-M family), along with 456 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM. It’s made up of over 18,000 logic gates, which Arm says is at least 12 times more than the previous plastic-based chip.

The chip was designed in coordination with flexible electronics maker PragmatIC, and as the company’s designers explain in an article published in Nature, it does not yet have the same functionality as silicon-based designs. For example, it is only able to run a trio of hard-wired test programs into its circuits during manufacture, although Arm researchers say they are working on future versions that will allow installation of a new code.

Image: arm

What makes PlasticARM and similar chips so special is their use of flexible components; in this case, thin film metal oxide transistors or TFT. These can be printed on surfaces that bend and flex without degrading, unlike processors based on fragile silicon substrates. This allows processors to print inexpensively on materials like plastic and paper.

As the Arm researchers explain in their article, this would allow microchips to be used for all kinds of uses that seem unnecessary today. You might have chips printed in every bottle of milk, for example, that detect spoilage, replacing the use of expiration dates. Arm says it will create a new “internet of everything”, with chips embedded in “over a trillion inanimate objects over the next decade.”

Plastic-based chips have some major drawbacks, however, and are unlikely to replace silicon processors in the short term. They are simply too inefficient in terms of power consumption, density and performance. PlasticARM consumes 21 milliwatts of power, for example, but 99% of that is essentially wasted, with only 1% captured for the compute. The chip is also relatively large, with an area of ​​59.2 square millimeters. As noted by AnandTech, that’s about 1,500 times the size of a Cortex M0 silicon-based processor.

As research engineer Arm James Myers said New scientist: “It won’t be quick, it won’t be energy efficient, but if I’m going to put it on a lettuce to track shelf life, that’s the idea.”