Slashdot Mirror
The First Plastic Computer Processor
jcombel writes "There's been a lot of talk lately about developing replacements for silicon; how about a nearly-transparent film of plastic, woven into clothing or affixed directly to equipment? From the article, 'Researchers in Europe used 4,000 plastic, or organic, transistors to create the plastic microprocessor, which measures roughly two centimeters square and is built on top of flexible plastic foil. ... The processor can so far run only one simple program of 16 instructions. The commands are hardcoded into a second foil etched with plastic circuits that can be connected to the processor to "load" the program. This allows the processor to calculate a running average of an incoming signal, something that a chip involved in processing the signal from a sensor might do.'"
Now geeks can get socially acceptable plastic surgery.
16 instructions should be enough for everybody!
They should implement the 6502 processor and add an SDHC interface(s) for expansion.
FTA:
The chip runs at a speed of six hertz-on the order of a million times slower than a modern desktop machine-and can only process information in eight-bit chunks at most, compared to 128 bits for modern computer processors.
Given that each core my desktop processor runs at 2.5 GHz, I'm running close to 500 million times faster than this chip, ignoring parallelization. Also, did I miss something, or are they also wrong at citing word length at 128 bits for modern processors? Or are they talking about something other than word length?
I would expect this kind of inaccuracy from a slashdot summary of an infoworld article, but not in an article in the MIT Technology Review. What is this world coming to?
foil noun
Definition of FOIL
1 : very thin sheet metal <aluminum foil>
I had one of these back in the 1960's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digi-Comp_I
long before we can "print" similar circuits at home? interesting non-digital apps come to mind also
Can we run Linux with it?
Honestly, how is this better than a silicon die in a Plastic carrier? I already can make a processor so thin that you would not feel it in a shirt, and you can waterproof it so it will survive washings. Flexing is not an issue as it's too tiny to care.
Other than a "neat-o lookie what we did" aspect, I can not see any practical use to replace a silicon die of the same thing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Today, featuring PCB BK
Forgetting Turing-complete machines for a moment, years ago I was asked to look at a circuit for controlling a stepper motor. It was overheating despite using CMOS logic. The designer was a mad genius; that is, he had implemented a gate-level-coded simple microprocessor with 16 instructions, and a hard-coded memory so that the 4 basic ops (up,down,left,right) each caused the thing to cycle through a set of those instructions at a maximum of 200 ips. But he hadn't understood what happened when you left gates floating in CMOS, so all the unused gates were floating and drawing a lot of current.
We replaced this amazing bit of design with a small PIC, in case you hadn't guessed.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
It's got 22 instructions and is made entirely of plastic legos.
Now I need to figure how to make legos smaller and smaller.
Who would ever want to hook a bunch off different computers together. It's a lot cheaper and more reliable to ship 9 track mag tapes if you need to move real data, or just lease some lines from the phone company,
Why is Snark Required?