This has not previously been possible with the emerging flexible TFT technology, in which a certain level of technology maturity is required before a large-scale integration can be done.Ī midway approach has been to integrate silicon-based microprocessor dies onto flexible substrates-also called hybrid integration 3, 4, 5-where the silicon wafer is thinned and dies from the wafer are integrated onto a flexible substrate. The main reason why no viable flexible microprocessor yet exists is that a relatively large number of TFTs need to be integrated on a flexible substrate in order to perform any meaningful computation. The missing piece is the flexible microprocessor. These are the essential electronic components to build any smart integrated electronic device. Over the past two decades, flexible electronics have progressed to offer mature low-cost, thin, flexible and conformable devices, including sensors, memories, batteries, light-emitting diodes, energy harvesters, near-field communication/radio frequency identification and printed circuitry such as antennas. In addition, silicon chips are not naturally thin, flexible and conformable, all of which are highly desirable characteristics for embedded electronics in these everyday objects.įlexible electronics, on the other hand, does offer these desirable characteristics. Although economies of scale in silicon fabrication have helped to reduce unit costs dramatically, the unit cost of a microprocessor is still prohibitively high. Cost is the most important factor preventing conventional silicon technology from being viable in these everyday objects. Although conventional silicon technology has embedded at least one microprocessor into every ‘smart’ device on Earth, it faces key challenges to make everyday objects smarter, such as bottles (milk, juice, alcohol or perfume), food packages, garments, wearable patches, bandages, and so on. Microprocessors are at the heart of every electronic device, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, routers, servers, cars and, more recently, smart objects that make up the Internet of Things. However, TFTs enable electronic products with novel form factors and at cost points unachievable with silicon, thereby vastly expanding the range of potential applications. As both technologies continue to evolve, it is likely that silicon will maintain advantages in terms of performance, density and power efficiency. The aim of the TFT technology is not to replace silicon. Thin-film transistors (TFTs) can be fabricated on flexible substrates at a much lower processing cost than metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) fabricated on crystalline silicon wafers. They offer a number of advantages over crystalline silicon, including thinness, conformability and low manufacturing costs. Unlike conventional semiconductor devices, flexible electronic devices are built on substrates such as paper, plastic or metal foil, and use active thin-film semiconductor materials such as organics or metal oxides or amorphous silicon. PlasticARM pioneers the embedding of billions of low-cost, ultrathin microprocessors into everyday objects. Separate from the mainstream semiconductor industry, flexible electronics operate within a domain that seamlessly integrates with everyday objects through a combination of ultrathin form factor, conformability, extreme low cost and potential for mass-scale production. Here we report a 32-bit Arm (a reduced instruction set computing (RISC) architecture) microprocessor developed with metal-oxide thin-film transistor technology on a flexible substrate (which we call the PlasticARM). The microprocessor is now so embedded within our culture that it has become a meta-invention-that is, it is a tool that allows other inventions to be realized, most recently enabling the big data analysis needed for a COVID-19 vaccine to be developed in record time. 2) microprocessor, fabricated using 7 nm process technology). Since this ground-breaking achievement, there has been continuous technological development with increasing sophistication to the stage where state-of-the-art silicon 64-bit microprocessors now have 30 billion transistors (for example, the AWS Graviton2 (ref. 1), a modest 4-bit CPU (central processing unit) with 2,300 transistors fabricated using 10 μm process technology in silicon and capable only of simple arithmetic calculations. Nearly 50 years ago, Intel created the world’s first commercially produced microprocessor-the 4004 (ref.
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