【IC Design 】 The United States develops "plastic chip", the price is less than 1 cent?

Source: Science News 2022-06-21 13:44:28

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The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in collaboration with PragmatIC Semiconductor, a flexible electronics manufacturer, has designed a cheap plastic processor that can be mass-produced for less than a penny, ushering in the age of ubiquitous electronics, foreign media reported.

When each processor costs less than a penny, perhaps a bandage, a banana peel, or a bottle can become intelligent, but the dream scenario of scientists has not yet been realized because humans have not developed cheap processors.
The number of iot devices around the world, growing by billions every year, may seem like a huge number, but the potential is much bigger, and the key to holding back growth is expensive chips.

Previous research institutions have made various attempts, such as IN 2021, Arm launched a new plastic chip prototype called PlasticArm M0, which can directly print circuits on paper, plastic or fabric. However, despite nearly ten years of research, it still fails to reach the standard.

Researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and PragmatIC Semiconductor, a flexible electronics manufacturer, say existing chip designs are too complex to be mass-produced with plastic.
At this years International Symposium on Computer Architecture, the research team demonstrated a fully functional plastic chip and designed four - and eight-bit processors, but many details remain under wraps.
For chip manufacturing, the team used flexible thin-film semiconductor indium Gallium Zinc oxide (IGZO) technology, which has been used in the past for display panel manufacturing, as a reliable and mature technology, thin films can be bent into a curve with a radius of millimeters without any ill effects.

The research team has built a prototype of a 4-bit processor, 5.6mm2, containing 2,104 semiconductor devices with a yield of more than 80%, and estimates that it will cost less than 1 cent per chip to produce, truly ushering in the era of ubiquitous electronics.