3 ms·
My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Asid
by olliej 4y ago
My reading of this seems to be a matter of them simply reducing the chip complexity (down to 4 bit) so they can obviously have fewer components on the die. Aside from that simplification, I can't find anything actually new techniques.
It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor.
- ggm 4y agoIs the cost of the substrate a huge barrier in the field? I recall when gallium arsenide first came to market and when whatever was magic about ibm "copper" and diamond/graphite. Each time, it's wound up highly context specific and frankly not very informative to the market as I saw it. A cheap plastic substrate for low gate count functions might be a niche which fills supply chains in smart disposables, rfid and other contexts: cans of soup which tell you when their subject to a recall.. (another dream in rfid which never happened btw)
- acover 4y agoIt seems like they changed a lot and got a hugely different niche. > Instead of adapting an existing microcontroller architecture to plastic, Kumar’s team started from scratch to create a design called Flexicore. “Yield goes down very quickly as you increase gate count,” says Kumar. Knowing that, they came up with a design meant to minimize the number of gates needed. Using 4-bit and 8-bit logic instead of 16-bit or 32-bit helped. As did separating the memory that stores instructions from the memory that stores data. But they also cut down on the number and complexity of the instructions the processor is capable of executing. > The team further simplified, by designing the processor so it executes an instruction in a single clock cycle instead of the mulit-step pipelines of today’s CPUs. Then they designed logic that implements those instructions by reusing parts, further reducing the gate count. “In general, we were able to simplify the design of FlexiCores by tailoring them to the needs of flexible applications, which tend to be computationally simple,” says Nathaniel Bleier, Kumar's student. > All of this resulted in a 5.6 square millimeter 4-bit FlexiCore made up of just 2,104 semiconductor devices (about the same as the number of transistors in an Intel 4004 from 1971) versus some 56,340 devices for PlasticARM.
- mrtnmcc 4y agoBy reducing gate count on the processor, they effectively will make the programs longer (more instructions to do the same thing), but it doesn't seem like they are counting memory here..
- londons_explore 4y agoIt does raise the question... Why didn't they just use an Intel 4004... The patents have long expired and plenty of other companies make very old intel clones to out in modern products (eg. Most optical mice use a 50 year old intel to control a custom DSP to do image processing to figure out which way you're moving the mouse)
- derefr 4y agoOne of their (presumably motivated) choices was to use a Harvard architecture; which a 4004 isn’t.
- monocasa 4y agoProbably because NMOS masks don't translate well to this technology. And the chip has big standard cell auto placed and routed energy, so it's probably not that big of a deal for the benefit to be working in a sane HDL before hardening the design. And the ubiquitous 8051s don't typically use Intel masks AFAIK for the same reasons. You really want to optimize for whatever process node currently makes sense.
- ineedasername 4y ago>It also continues to annoy me that semiconductor-on-plastic gets labelled as a plastic processor. It's pretty common to call current processors "silicon chips", what's wrong with calling ones on a plastic substrate plastic chips?
- AdamH12113 4y agoIn silicon ICs, the silicon is actually part of the transistors.
- ineedasername 4y agoYes, but my impression (maybe wrong) is that the reference to silicon chips comes from the use of the substrate.