Flexible processor runs Arm code

Researchers from Arm and PragmatIC Semiconductor have fabricated the first flexible Arm-based microcontroller, consisting of metal-oxide thin-film transistors on a flexible substrate. Although the performance of the Plasticarm system-on-chip is more or less on par with the most advanced silicon from the early 1980s, that’s still twelve times more complex than the state of the art in flexible electronics.

The two British firms recently published details of the SoC in Nature. The flexible processor was manufactured in a 0.8 μm process, laying down about 18,000 logic gates in an area of 59 mm². It’s based on the Arm Cortex-M0 architecture and can run ArmV6-M code from its internal memory, which consists of 128 bytes of RAM and 456 bytes of ROM.