A demo video is now available in which the non-silicon RISC-V CPU “Flex-RV”, which can be bent smoothly, operates while being wrapped around a pen – GIGAZINE

British semiconductor manufacturer Pragmatic Semiconductor has collaborated with Harvard University and others to create a CPU that can be bent.Flex-RV” was developed. This chip is made of a flexible material unlike a general silicon chip, and Pragmatic Semiconductor has released a video of Flex-RV actually operating while being wrapped around a pen.

Bendable non-silicon RISC-V microprocessor | Nature
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07976-y

A Bendable Non-silicon RISC-V Microprocessor – Pragmatic Semiconductor, Qamcom, Harvard – YouTube

Flex-RV is an open source instruction set architectureRISC-Vbased onServ It is based on CPU cores. This Serv CPU uses the RV32E instruction set architecture, and uses a “bit serial method” that sequentially processes 32-bit operations bit by bit.

Flex-RV’s chip size is 9mm x 6mm, and each chip has two cores. Although the operating frequency is relatively slow at an average of 52 kHz and a maximum of 60 kHz, Pragmatic Semiconductor says that it is sufficient for embedded applications. Power consumption is very low at 3V and 5.8mW, and 99% of it is static power consumption.

Flex-RV uses indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) thin film transistor technology to provide flexiblepolyimideManufactured on a substrate. This technology allows the chips to achieve thicknesses of less than 80 μm and function with bending radii of less than 5 mm.

Pragmatic Semiconductor is a movie that executes a simple command to display “Hello World!” with Flex-RV wrapped around a thin pen.

Flex-RV also has built-in hardware accelerators for machine learning. This accelerator consists of a SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) engine that combines 8×4 and 4×4 multipliers to speed up post-processing of matrix operations and activation functions. Additionally, memory access requires customserial peripheral interface(C-SPI), which converts 79 RAM ports into 4 SPI ports and simplifies the chip’s external connections.

Flex-RV has very low manufacturing costs and is made of flexible and thin material, so it is expected to be used in wearable devices, disposable medical devices, and integration into product packaging. The research team argued that Flex-RV represents new computing possibilities that do not rely on traditional electronic components, ushering in an era of open standard 32-bit non-silicon microprocessors.