ARM has launched a prototype of a new chip made with a plastic -based material, dubbed PlasticARM. What is interesting?
This chip, because it is made of plastic, is quite flexible or flexible. This is not the first flexible chip available, but PlasticARM is much more complex than previous flexible chips.
PlasticARM uses a 32-bit Cortex-M0 CPU, which is the cheapest and easiest CPU in the Cortex-M family. It also has 456 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of RAM.
The chip uses 18,000 logic gateways, which, according to ARM, is 12 times more than previous plastic -based chips.
ARM partnered with PragmaticIC, which is a maker of flexible electronic components, to make this chip. They also acknowledge that these plastic chips do not yet have the same function as chips made of silicon.
For example, PlasticARM is only capable of running three test programs installed in its circuit, and these programs must be installed during the chip manufacturing process. But researchers at ARM believe that in the future they will be able to install new program code.
So what makes this PlasticARM special? Flexibility is the main advantage of this chip. The chip can be printed to a variety of flexible surfaces, and will not experience quality degradation. For example, plastic or paper.
As a result, according to researchers at ARM, the chip will be able to be attached to a variety of materials that are currently unimaginable. For example, chips will be printed into milk bottles to track expiration dates, as well as various other objects and make trillions of ‘internet of everything’ devices.
For now, these plastic -based chips still have one major drawback, which makes them irreplaceable by silicon -based chips - at least for now. That is, power consumption is too high, not commensurate with density and performance.
PlasticARM uses 21 milliwatts of power, and 99% of it will be wasted. In other words, only 1% of the electricity used is used to process the data. In addition, its size is too large for a chip in its class.
By comparison, the PlasticARM measures 59.2 mm square, and that’s 1500 times larger than the silicon-based Cortex-M0 processor.
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