Posted on 07/18/2022 3:04:26 PM PDT by algore
For decades, hopeful techies have been promising a world where absolutely every object you encounter—bandages, bottles, bananas—will have some kind of smarts thanks to supercheap programmable plastic processors.
If you’ve been wondering why that hasn’t happened yet, it’s that nobody has built working processors that can be made in the billions for less than a penny each.
It hasn’t been for want of trying; in 2021 Arm reproduced its simplest 32-bit microcontroller, the M0, in plastic, but even this couldn’t hope to meet the mark.
The problem, according to engineers at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and at British flexible-electronics manufacture PragmatIC Semiconductor, is that even the simplest industry-standard microcontrollers are too complex to make on plastic in bulk.
In research to be presented at the International Symposium on Computer Architecture later this month, the transatlantic team presents a simple yet fully functional plastic processor that could be made at sub-penny prices. The Illinois team designed 4-bit and 8-bit processors specifically to minimize size and maximize the percentage of working integrated circuits produced.
Eighty-one percent of the 4-bit version worked, and that’s a good enough yield, says team leader Rakesh Kumar, to breach the one-penny barrier.
32 bit?!? You'd be amazed at what the U.S. Air Force could do with 4 bit processors in aircraft radar systems back in the 1960s.
40+ years ago RCA had a 4 bit processor (COPS) that cost less than a dollar. It was really slow but good for some simple things. Ran at 1MHz. We’ve come a ways since then.
I design and build ignition systems. In the late ‘90’s one of the Turbo Buick “gurus” gave me an ignition module, to see if I could soup it up. It’s early ‘80’s vintage.
I spent several weeks unpotting it, then reverse engineered it. It used an RCA processor, with about a 100kHz clock made from an op amp wired as an oscillator.
http://jandssafeguard.com/images/GNModule1.jpg
http://jandssafeguard.com/images/GNModule2.jpg
http://jandssafeguard.com/images/GNModule3.jpg
Cool tech, sure, but what will they do with it?
Track us
Whatever they did with 4-bit processors back in the 1960s, those processors were not in chip form.
No, they were not. The processor was a circuit board, not a chip. The individual logic gates (And, Or, Invert, JK Flip-Flops) were.
You'd be amazed how many ICs were in the Avionics of the F-111A Aardvark that was built in 1966-67. The Ds, Es, and especially the Fs, that came later, even more so.
They had "ALU processors," which IIRC were one or two bits each (meaning they had to be ganged together to do math on realistic word length data) that were more like $140 each.
Military projects almost totally funded early chip development for companies like Fairchild and Texas Instruments.
And the space program, of course.
Actually there was! Hughes aircraft designed a bit serial micro for the F14 radar in the early 70s. Ieee had an article on probably 2 decades ago. Really cool too. It did complex arithmetic because of its radar interpretation tasks.
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