ARM PlasticArm

2021: Plastic microprocessor announcement

In July 2021, ARM introduced a microprocessor created not from silicon, like most other chips, but from plastic. Thanks to the new material, the company achieved a flexible design. The new product is called PlasticArm.

It combines metal oxide thin film transistors (TFTs) applied over a soft substrate. This gives the chip the necessary elastic properties, and also significantly cheaper production.

The chip is made on the 32-bit Cortex-M0 architecture, received only 128 bytes of RAM and 456 bytes of ROM, but the company notes that its design is 12 times more complicated than its previous counterparts. The processor frequency is 29 kHz, and the power consumption is about 20 mW. The size of the module is only 9 x 9 mm.

ARM introduced a cheap PlasticArm processor made not of silicon, but of plastic

Despite the compatibility of the PlasticARM flexible chip with all Cortex-M processors, there is one key difference between them. A certain portion of RAM (about 64 bytes) in the PlasticARM is allocated to the processor registers and is in RAM, while in Cortex-M0 + the registers remain in the processor. Slower access to registers in the PlasticARM is offset by a significant reduction - up to three times, the area of ​ ​ the chip's most central processor.

The presented chip, as noted in ARM, cannot be installed in any of the devices available on the market. Nevertheless, the manufacturer assures that it is developing flexible processors for wearable gadgets and Internet of Things devices, and in the foreseeable future they may appear in smartphones.

ARM engineer John Biggs says flexible processors can be used in the production of all kinds of smart sensors, as well as smart labels and packages to track the status of products. In addition, they can be applied directly to the skin to monitor health.^[1]

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