A demo video of a non-silicon RISC-V CPU 'Flex-RV' that can be bent easily and wrapped around a pen is now available
British semiconductor manufacturer Pragmatic Semiconductor has collaborated with Harvard University and others to develop a CPU called Flex-RV , which can be bent and twisted. This chip is made of a flexible material unlike ordinary silicon chips, and Pragmatic Semiconductor has released a video of the Flex-RV being wrapped around a pen while in operation.
Bendable non-silicon RISC-V microprocessor | Nature
A Bendable Non-silicon RISC-V Microprocessor - Pragmatic Semiconductor, Qamcom, Harvard - YouTube
Flex-RV is based on the Serv CPU core, which is based on the open source instruction set architecture RISC-V . This Serv CPU uses the RV32E instruction set architecture and employs a bit-serial method that processes 32-bit operations one bit at a time.
The Flex-RV chip size is 9mm x 6mm, and each chip has two cores. The operating frequency is relatively slow, at an average of 52kHz and a maximum of 60kHz, but Pragmatic Semiconductor says that this is sufficient for embedded applications. Power consumption is very low at 3V and 5.8mW, and 99% of that is static power consumption.
Flex-RV is fabricated using indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) thin-film transistor technology on a flexible
In the movie, Pragmatic Semiconductor runs a simple command to display 'Hello World!' using a Flex-RV wrapped around a thin pen.
Flex-RV also incorporates a hardware accelerator for machine learning. This accelerator is composed of a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) engine that combines 8x4 and 4x4 multipliers to accelerate matrix operations and post-processing of activation functions. In addition, a custom
Because Flex-RV has very low manufacturing costs and is made of flexible and thin materials, it is expected to be applied to wearable devices, disposable medical devices, and product packaging. The research team argued that Flex-RV shows the possibility of new computing that does not rely on conventional electronic components, and opens the era of open standard 32-bit non-silicon microprocessors.
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