Bendable non-silicon RISC-V microprocessor

Emre Ozer (), Jedrzej Kufel, Shvetank Prakash, Alireza Raisiardali, Olof Kindgren, Ronald Wong, Nelson Ng, Damien Jausseran, Feras Alkhalil, David Kong, Gage Hills, Richard Price and Vijay Janapa Reddi
Additional contact information
Emre Ozer: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Jedrzej Kufel: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Shvetank Prakash: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Alireza Raisiardali: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Olof Kindgren: Qamcom
Ronald Wong: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Nelson Ng: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Damien Jausseran: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Feras Alkhalil: Pragmatic Semiconductor
David Kong: Harvard University
Gage Hills: Harvard University
Richard Price: Pragmatic Semiconductor
Vijay Janapa Reddi: Harvard University

Nature, 2024, vol. 634, issue 8033, 341-346

Abstract: Abstract Semiconductors have already had a very profound effect on society, accelerating scientific research and driving greater connectivity. Future semiconductor hardware will open up new possibilities in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and edge computing, for applications such as cybersecurity and personalized healthcare. By nature of its ethos, open hardware provides opportunities for even greater collaboration and innovations across education, academic research and industry. Here we present Flex-RV, a 32-bit microprocessor based on an open RISC-V (ref. 1) instruction set fabricated with indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors2 on a flexible polyimide substrate, enabling an ultralow-cost bendable microprocessor. Flex-RV also integrates a programmable machine learning (ML) hardware accelerator inside the microprocessor and demonstrates new instructions to extend the RISC-V instruction set to run ML workloads. It is implemented, fabricated and demonstrated to operate at 60 kHz consuming less than 6 mW power. Its functionality when assembled onto a flexible printed circuit board is validated while executing programs under flat and tight bending conditions, achieving no worse than 4.3% performance variation on average. Flex-RV pioneers an era of sub-dollar open standard non-silicon 32-bit microprocessors and will democratize access to computing and unlock emerging applications in wearables, healthcare devices and smart packaging.

Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07976-y Abstract (text/html)
Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nat:nature:v:634:y:2024:i:8033:d:10.1038_s41586-024-07976-y

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.nature.com/

DOI: 10.1038/s41586-024-07976-y

Access Statistics for this article

Nature is currently edited by Magdalena Skipper

More articles in Nature from Nature
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().