The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
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The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
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Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#2My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Aside from that simplification, I can't find anything actually new techniques.
It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#3My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Aside from that simplification, I can't find anything actually new techniques. It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
Is the cost of the substrate a huge barrier in the field? I recall when gallium arsenide first came to market and when whatever was magic about ibm "copper" and diamond/graphite. Each time, it's wound up highly context specific and frankly not very informative to the market as I saw it.
A cheap plastic substrate for low gate count functions might be a niche which fills supply chains in smart disposables, rfid and other contexts: cans of soup which tell you when their subject to a recall.. (another dream in rfid which never happened btw)
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#4My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Aside from that simplification, I can't find anything actually new techniques. It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
It seems like they changed a lot and got a hugely different niche.
> Instead of adapting an existing microcontroller architecture to plastic, Kumar’s team started from scratch to create a design called Flexicore. “Yield goes down very quickly as you increase gate count,” says Kumar. Knowing that, they came up with a design meant to minimize the number of gates needed. Using 4-bit and 8-bit logic instead of 16-bit or 32-bit helped. As did separating the memory that stores instructions from the memory that stores data. But they also cut down on the number and complexity of the instructions the processor is capable of executing.
> The team further simplified, by designing the processor so it executes an instruction in a single clock cycle instead of the mulit-step pipelines of today’s CPUs. Then they designed logic that implements those instructions by reusing parts, further reducing the gate count. “In general, we were able to simplify the design of FlexiCores by tailoring them to the needs of flexible applications, which tend to be computationally simple,” says Nathaniel Bleier, Kumar's student.
> All of this resulted in a 5.6 square millimeter 4-bit FlexiCore made up of just 2,104 semiconductor devices (about the same as the number of transistors in an Intel 4004 from 1971) versus some 56,340 devices for PlasticARM.
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#5My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Aside from that simplification, I can't find anything actually new techniques. It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
>It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
It's pretty common to call current processors "silicon chips", what's wrong with calling ones on a plastic substrate plastic chips?
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#6Great, a thinking banana.
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#7if only they could put a little red led in the core.
I realize the wafer has no bus, but I have an irrational desire for an all plastic 4 bit connection machine. I can handle failed nodes on the front machine. I want to allocate a zector of bites and make the lights blink.
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#8We discussed a different project from the same source a little over a month ago[1].
Yes, they are making transistors out of plastic[2]. ”We coat everything on that, then peel it off and reuse the glass a carriers which means we can use silicon equipment.”
That they manage to get this to work at all is amazing. I view this as a technology demonstrator more than anything else. It looks like there's a pent up demand for low end processing that this might fill.
Still no comment about this from Sam Zeloof[3] 8)
[1] - https://fuse.wikichip.org/news/6648/reincarnating-the-6502-u...
[2] - https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/first-300mm-fab-for-the-uk/
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#9My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Aside from that simplification, I can't find anything actually new techniques. It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
>It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor. It's pretty common to call current processors "silicon chips", what's wrong with calling ones on a plastic substrate plastic chips?
In silicon ICs, the silicon is actually part of the transistors.
Re: The first high-yield, sub-penny plastic processor
#10Soon it'll run EC2 instances