Arm and PragmatIC revealed a new microprocessor, PlasticArm, built with “metal-oxide thin-film transistor technology on a flexible substrate” instead of the silicon used in traditional processors. The processor isn’t all that powerful, but it could have serious implications for connected devices.
“The potential for this technology is beyond significant,” Arm said. “PlasticArm is bringing the possibility of seamlessly embedding billions of extremely low-cost, ultra-thin, conformable microprocessors into everyday objects–a significant leap forward in realizing the Internet of Things.”
Arm and PragmatIC said PlasticArm is “an ultra-minimalist Cortex-M0-based SoC, with just 128 bytes of RAM and 456 bytes of ROM,” which means it’s far weaker than silicon-based chips. But it’s still “twelve times more complex than the previous state-of-the-art flexible electronics.”
PlasticArm has been a long time coming. Arm said it first started collaborating with PragmatIC on a flexible processor in 2013. The research led to a few prototypes before the companies shifted their attention to PlasticArmPit, an “e-nose” made up of sensors embedded in plastic chips.
Work on PlasticArm picked back up “a few years” later, and “the world’s first fully functional non-silicon Arm processor” was completed in October 2020, Arm said.
PlasticArm offers a few key benefits over silicon chips. Foremost is cost—Arm and PragmatIC said in a Nature article that “although economies of scale in silicon fabrication have helped to reduce unit costs dramatically, the unit cost of a microprocessor is still prohibitively high.”
Another factor in favor of plastic: flexibility. The companies said that “silicon chips are not naturally thin, flexible, and conformable.” Plastic is, however, which means that it should be easier to incorporate microprocessors built using the material into a wider variety of objects.
What kinds of objects? Arm and PragmatIC said the reduced costs and flexibility afforded by plastic processors means they might find their way into everyday items such as “bottles (milk, juice, alcohol or perfume), food packages, garments, wearable patches, bandages, and so on.”
All of that depends on the commercial viability of PlasticArm, but Arm hasn’t said when the project will leave the research phase, or even confirmed that it’s in the process of doing so. But it’s undeniable that Arm and PragmatIC have grand designs for their plastic microprocessor.
“We envisage that [PlasticArm] will pioneer the development of low-cost, fully flexible smart integrated systems to enable an ‘internet of everything’ consisting of the integration of more than a trillion inanimate objects over the next decade into the digital world,” the companies said. “Having an ultrathin, conformable, low-cost, natively flexible microprocessor for everyday objects will unravel innovations leading to a variety of research and business opportunities.”
