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The World's First Flexible Organic Microprocessor
An anonymous reader writes "European researchers at Imec recently announced the development of the world's first flexible organic microprocessor at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference in San Francisco CA. 'The 4000-transistor, 8-bit logic circuit has the processing power of only a 1970s-era silicon model, but it has a key advantage—it can bend. The device’s designers say the chip could lead the way to cheaper flexible displays and sensors. Wrapped around pipes, for example, sheets of sensors with these processors could record average water pressure, and wrapped around food and pharmaceuticals, they might indicate that your tuna is rancid or that you forgot to take your pills.'"
The world's 1st flexible organic microprocessor was probably some type of worm, circa 500 million years ago.
..they might indicate that your tuna is rancid...
My god, man, where are you getting your tuna from?
I haven't seen the device, but this is not an all-organic device. From TFA, at least part of the electrodes are made of gold. Moreover, they use pentacene as a semiconductor, which is probably deposited with CVD. The IEEE article is tagged with "printed electronics" and I seriously doubt they managed to make this using the soluble form of pentacene (i.e. TIPS-pentacene). Still, this is not to poop on the achevement. It's a nifty feat and congrats to the team that managed to make this.
Res publica non dominetur
...will it blend?
Microprocessors have become small enough that flexibility isn't necessary for the applications cited in the summary. I can't really think of any situations where a flexible microprocessor would be more appropriate than a suitably small one...
... or that you forgot to take your pills.
I did forget, thanks!
Be seeing you...
I like my semiconductors happy, free-run, pesticide free, and grown on certified hobby farms. I'm glad the official organic label has finally been applied.
and no, I didn't RTFA
Karma: Excellent. 15 moderator points expire sometime.
'The 4000-transistor, 8-bit logic circuit has the processing power of only a 1970s-era silicon model, but it has a key advantage—it can bend.
Did anyone else read "it can blend"?
I seem to recall the brain is organic, and it's a processor. And in Worf's case, indeed, a microprocessor.
My brain is an organic processor and some people accuse it of being microscopic!
Summary made a mention of using them to track water pressure - why not use them tracker water temperature?
Lots of older homes ( not to mention city infrastructure in my region ) are using old pipes and nobody really knows when they are going to freeze. A system that tracks the water temperature ( and the temp of the pipe itself, I guess ) would give people a warning ahead of time when their water pipes are dipping near freezing point.
Would it really be useful in a large scale thing with the city? Probably not. It'd be prohibitively expensive to fit all these pipes with the sensors even if only at regular intervals.
At a smaller scale, I think'd it be more useful. A little computer setup that emails you when your pipe hits a programmable low point, so you can make preparations to fix the problem or clean the mess, and maybe texts you when your pipe hits freezing.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is already patented either. It seems like something you'd give a catchy name ( Pipedog! ) and sell for 20 bucks with a matching smoke alarm at 1am in the paid programming slots.
You could impregnate the skin and substructure of aircraft with these to give the aircraft a "nervous system" to help detect areas of abnormally high stress or fracture. I bet they could be used to detect ice buildup on wings as well. Hell... you could probably use them to detect air pressure distribution along the flying surfaces to help detect stalls, impending windshear and ambient atmospheric anomalies as well. I wonder if they could withstand the forces/temperatures inside a turbine engine?
Not to knock the tech but how was microchip rigidity stopping you from putting these sensors in the lids/walls of these containers (tuna can, pill bottle, pipes) before? It's not like any of them bend much in their usage...
I've always wanted a can of tuna that can run CP/M
I can hardly wait for the latest batch of snobbery organic food crowd. "My computer runs using purely organic parts."
...it has a key advantageâ"it can bend.
Meh. Let me know when it can blend.
No sig for you!!
Why not just make the pipes cubic instead of round :P
So...instead of being called hardware, these would be...software? I'm so confused!
It would serve you in the most unusual ways.
A bicycle chain is made of rigid links, yet appears flexible. Objects flexible on a large scale don't have to be made up of small-scale components which are themselves flexible.
A flexible film can contain tiny inflexible chips.
Suppose a thin film, like food wrap, is bent to a curvature of 0.25 cm radius. That's not actually a significant curvature on the scale of something that is much smaller than a millimeter.
It does sound like these engineers touting the flexibility of the processor not because it's an important real-world requirement, but only because it justifies the work they are doing.
The official "organic" is stupid, because many organic compounds are not of biological origin; e.g. fluorinated or chlorinated hydrocarbons. Even compounds carbon-silicon bonds are called "organosilicon".
Then there is the problem that some molecules in living things have inorganic components, like organo-metallic compounds (haemoglobin, chlorophyll, ...).
The "organic food" people have reclaimed the word for a use which is closer to what it suggests: originating in the organs of a living thing.
A pesticide with chlorinated benzene rings does not originate in a living thing, and neither does silicone rubber.
The "organic food" people have reclaimed the word for a use which is closer to what it suggests: originating in the organs of a living thing.
In other words the neo-Luddite "organic food" people have rekindled vitalism.
A bike chain is not really all that flexible, even in the direction of the hinging.
Also, I have seen, recently, bicycles with rubber belts (with teeth). I'm not sure why, but some people seem to think they are worth manufacturing.
Flexibility has its uses. In this case, the flexibility may be useful at scales where the simply small well tend to bind, much the way a bike chain will tend to bind.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I didn't think about blending (although it's an interesting thought, would these tend (statistically) to survive a blender or to be blended by a blender?
But what I noticed is that 4000 would be a bit over half the transistors necessary for a 6809, and that induced a daydream about running a bunch of OS9-6809 hardware instances in the bracelet you give your wife. Or having a cluster of TRS 80 Color Computers in your belt.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.