British startup Pragmatic Semiconductor has unveiled a 32-bit microprocessor that can run machine learning models, is flexible and costs less than a euro.
Named Flex-RV, this chip is based on open architecture RISC-V and uses a completely different material to achieve its highly customizable design.
According to Nature, this material is called Indium Gallium Zinc Oxide (IGZO), which replaces conventional silicon.
The key innovation lies in avoiding the complicated (and expensive) packaging that silicon chips require to protect their fragile nature from the stresses caused by bending. In contrast, IGZO transistors can be printed directly on plastic substrates at low temperatures.
In its demonstration, Pragmatic shows that the Flex-RV wraps itself around a straw and then unfolds and continues to run the code undisturbed.
Don't expect great performance, though. With only 12.600 logic gates, the Flex-RV prototype achieves a maximum clock speed of just 60 kHz. Despite these modest performance numbers, the chip successfully incorporates a low-power machine learning accelerator.
Consuming less than 6 mW of power, this highly efficient chip is ideal for powering disposable medical devices and a new frontier of versatile wearable gadgets for the body, such as enhanced health devices, soft robotics, in games, even brain-computer interfaces.
Additionally, by leveraging the free and open source RISC-V instruction set, Pragmatic has avoided the expensive architecture licensing fees that typically inflate the cost of chips.
See the relevant presentation video below:
