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Some questions you might consider which would help you to think of some use cases; 1) How would wiring to you processor work? 2) How many flexible compute app

Some questions you might consider which would help you to think of some use cases; 1) How would wiring to you processor work? 2) How many flexible compute applications are currently using just really small processors? 3) Given that Pragmatic has raised a lot of money, what was it in their use case that the investors thought would make a better product? 4) Besides flexibility, are there other requirements in this product space? 5) Given that you've just imagined a product with a flexible screen but solid pixels, does this exist on the market? Are there flexible screens on the market? How do those screens choose to implement flex versus the idea you have proposed? What factors might make their choices better (or worse) than the idea you proposed? I'm not being critical here, I think you start with an excellent starter question which is "Would the requirements be satisfied by sufficiently small electronics such that [the] lack of flexibility [in the electronics] doesn't matter?" The trick then is to see if you can see how other people who invested time and money in answering either that, or a closely adjacent, question answered it. When you do that you'll get to see what they thought the overall requirements were vs the technology they picked, and perhaps it might inform if the Pragmatic solution would be a better fit or the 'tiny electronics' solution would be a better fit. I'll be the first to admit that I'm 'weird' in that I really do enjoy going down these sort of engineering optimization rabbit holes to develop a better understanding of what problems various proposed solutions are trying to solve.

saulrh 2y ago
> 1) How would wiring to you processor work? My (relatively limited) experience is that this is what really makes wearable projects obnoxious. Even if you have a chip with a tiny footprint, you either put it on a breakout board that isn't tiny or you spend twenty hours soldering nearly microscopic bits of magnet wire to it. It's the same for the piles of passive components and peripherals that every project requires, the voltage regulators and smoothing capacitors and power transistors and stuff: You either attach everything to a big PCB or you're faced with a spaghetti nightmare of point-to-point wiring that makes "normal" dead-bug circuitry, the kind you might find embedded in a block of resin for aesthetic points, look like a walk in the park. Flexible processors don't necessarily solve that problem, but they definitely demonstrate that flexible circuits in general are advancing in useful ways, better signal quality and longer runs and better process yield. The bigger these things get the better they are for replacing that mess of integration spaghetti that I always see DIY wearable projects suffering from. (I think that industrial wearables typically solve this by concentrating everything complicated down to a rigid brain-box, c.f. smart-watches or those heated jackets that have a socket for a power tool battery in the pocket.)
- marshray 2y ago
  > or you spend twenty hours soldering nearly microscopic bits of magnet wire to it. A real chip would only need two or three contacts to vastly outperform thing demonstrated here. These would probably not be soldered, they would ideally be bonded directly to the chip. Imagine a near-microscopic 4-ball BGA on a bit of flexible PCB, except the PCB material can flex in multiple axes simultaneously.
  - eternityforest 2y ago
    Isn't that kind of like how RFID labels work? That's probably the most common use case for flexible anything at the moment, and they work great
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  You can look at die attach[1] which basically solders to pads on the circuit board (no magnet wires required :-)). [1] "Die Attach Comes to PCBs" --- https://www.eeweb.com/die-attach-comes-to-pcbs/ https://www.eeweb.com/die-attach-comes-to-pcbs/
  - kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
    That article describes traditional chip on board construction that has been in use for decades. Buried at the end it mentions wire bonding as the final step. i.e. pads are up. Flip chip mounting requires careful attention to thermal expansion coefficients. You're not going to do that on any run of the mill cheap board or flex materials.
marshray 2y ago
> 1) How would wiring to you processor work? Sure, there's a modulus gap to be interfaced, but flexible circuits have been worked on forever. The whole point is of this tech is that the transistors themselves are flexible. But since the transistors they end up with are orders of magnitude worse than what the microprocessor age started with, to me this just shows that this tech is not anywhere close to practical application.
- ChuckMcM 2y ago
  Yes, the entire chip (wiring and transistors) is flexible. Which is something I find kind of amazing. Back in 2008 there was a company in the UK called 'Plastic Logic'[1] that was going to make an e-reader that could be rolled up. Back when organic LEDs were just starting to be possible and this stuff was living on a glass substrate, doing "all" of the circuits in long change hydrocarbons was a pretty revolutionary idea. My original point was that dismissing the technology out of hand because you imagine you could solve the same problem with tiny ICs is probably premature. Dismissing any technology coming to market because you think it doesn't solve any problem is usually a bad idea because it takes non-zero effort and resources to bring anything to market. As a result, if you imagine what something is irrelevant because there are other proven solutions, then take that as a signal to say "Hmmm, what am I missing here?" > But since the transistors they end up with are orders of > magnitude worse than what the microprocessor age started > with, to me this just shows that this tech is not anywhere > close to practical application. This doesn't really track though does it? The "first" microprocessor, the 4004 ran at 750kHz max. Most of the challenge here appears to be heat dissipation as plastic melts at a much lower temperature than silicon, but the chemistry is still interesting. I completely agree that this isn't going to displace servers in the data center any time soon, but I can imagine applications for an all (or nearly all) plastic computer on a flexible plastic substrate. [1] Their IP (not the reader though) lives on at https://www.e-pi.com/ https://www.e-pi.com/
  - marshray 2y ago
    > The "first" microprocessor, the 4004 ran at 750kHz max. The 4004 wasn't useful to power a general-purpose computer as we think of one today, it was made for a 4 function calculator and it's hard to find many examples of it being used in other systems online. It took another 10 years of Moore's Law for the ingredients to come together and microprocessor-powered desktop computers to achieve critical mass. Look at Table 2 in the (awful, IMO) Nature article. This thing is 10x slower than even a 4004. > Dismissing any technology coming to market because you think it doesn't solve any problem is usually a bad idea because it takes non-zero effort and resources to bring anything to market. As a result, if you imagine what something is irrelevant because there are other proven solutions, then take that as a signal to say "Hmmm, what am I missing here?" 100%! But is there reason to think Moore's Law is happening here? Or did these researchers just print some minimum viable transistors on kapton?
mncharity 2y ago
> The trick then is to see if you can see how other people who invested time and money in answering either that, or OT, but I've been wondering how one might teach this young. Perhaps LLM-generated business case studies? Other thoughts? Part of the context is generative storytelling might permit intensively overlaying implicit curriculum on to existing learning objectives (eg, it's a chemistry problem, but chosen to also scaffold biology and illustrate supply chains).

saulrh 2y ago

> 1) How would wiring to you processor work? My (relatively limited) experience is that this is what really makes wearable projects obnoxious. Even if you have a chip with a tiny footprint, you either put it on a breakout board that isn't tiny or you spend twenty hours soldering nearly microscopic bits of magnet wire to it. It's the same for the piles of passive components and peripherals that every project requires, the voltage regulators and smoothing capacitors and power transistors and stuff: You either attach everything to a big PCB or you're faced with a spaghetti nightmare of point-to-point wiring that makes "normal" dead-bug circuitry, the kind you might find embedded in a block of resin for aesthetic points, look like a walk in the park. Flexible processors don't necessarily solve that problem, but they definitely demonstrate that flexible circuits in general are advancing in useful ways, better signal quality and longer runs and better process yield. The bigger these things get the better they are for replacing that mess of integration spaghetti that I always see DIY wearable projects suffering from. (I think that industrial wearables typically solve this by concentrating everything complicated down to a rigid brain-box, c.f. smart-watches or those heated jackets that have a socket for a power tool battery in the pocket.)

marshray 2y ago
> or you spend twenty hours soldering nearly microscopic bits of magnet wire to it. A real chip would only need two or three contacts to vastly outperform thing demonstrated here. These would probably not be soldered, they would ideally be bonded directly to the chip. Imagine a near-microscopic 4-ball BGA on a bit of flexible PCB, except the PCB material can flex in multiple axes simultaneously.
- eternityforest 2y ago
  Isn't that kind of like how RFID labels work? That's probably the most common use case for flexible anything at the moment, and they work great
ChuckMcM 2y ago
You can look at die attach[1] which basically solders to pads on the circuit board (no magnet wires required :-)). [1] "Die Attach Comes to PCBs" --- https://www.eeweb.com/die-attach-comes-to-pcbs/ https://www.eeweb.com/die-attach-comes-to-pcbs/
- kevin_thibedeau 2y ago
  That article describes traditional chip on board construction that has been in use for decades. Buried at the end it mentions wire bonding as the final step. i.e. pads are up. Flip chip mounting requires careful attention to thermal expansion coefficients. You're not going to do that on any run of the mill cheap board or flex materials.

marshray 2y ago

> 1) How would wiring to you processor work? Sure, there's a modulus gap to be interfaced, but flexible circuits have been worked on forever. The whole point is of this tech is that the transistors themselves are flexible. But since the transistors they end up with are orders of magnitude worse than what the microprocessor age started with, to me this just shows that this tech is not anywhere close to practical application.

ChuckMcM 2y ago
Yes, the entire chip (wiring and transistors) is flexible. Which is something I find kind of amazing. Back in 2008 there was a company in the UK called 'Plastic Logic'[1] that was going to make an e-reader that could be rolled up. Back when organic LEDs were just starting to be possible and this stuff was living on a glass substrate, doing "all" of the circuits in long change hydrocarbons was a pretty revolutionary idea. My original point was that dismissing the technology out of hand because you imagine you could solve the same problem with tiny ICs is probably premature. Dismissing any technology coming to market because you think it doesn't solve any problem is usually a bad idea because it takes non-zero effort and resources to bring anything to market. As a result, if you imagine what something is irrelevant because there are other proven solutions, then take that as a signal to say "Hmmm, what am I missing here?" > But since the transistors they end up with are orders of > magnitude worse than what the microprocessor age started > with, to me this just shows that this tech is not anywhere > close to practical application. This doesn't really track though does it? The "first" microprocessor, the 4004 ran at 750kHz max. Most of the challenge here appears to be heat dissipation as plastic melts at a much lower temperature than silicon, but the chemistry is still interesting. I completely agree that this isn't going to displace servers in the data center any time soon, but I can imagine applications for an all (or nearly all) plastic computer on a flexible plastic substrate. [1] Their IP (not the reader though) lives on at https://www.e-pi.com/ https://www.e-pi.com/
- marshray 2y ago
  > The "first" microprocessor, the 4004 ran at 750kHz max. The 4004 wasn't useful to power a general-purpose computer as we think of one today, it was made for a 4 function calculator and it's hard to find many examples of it being used in other systems online. It took another 10 years of Moore's Law for the ingredients to come together and microprocessor-powered desktop computers to achieve critical mass. Look at Table 2 in the (awful, IMO) Nature article. This thing is 10x slower than even a 4004. > Dismissing any technology coming to market because you think it doesn't solve any problem is usually a bad idea because it takes non-zero effort and resources to bring anything to market. As a result, if you imagine what something is irrelevant because there are other proven solutions, then take that as a signal to say "Hmmm, what am I missing here?" 100%! But is there reason to think Moore's Law is happening here? Or did these researchers just print some minimum viable transistors on kapton?

mncharity 2y ago

> The trick then is to see if you can see how other people who invested time and money in answering either that, or OT, but I've been wondering how one might teach this young. Perhaps LLM-generated business case studies? Other thoughts? Part of the context is generative storytelling might permit intensively overlaying implicit curriculum on to existing learning objectives (eg, it's a chemistry problem, but chosen to also scaffold biology and illustrate supply chains).