processors have come a really long way over the past few decades but one thing that's remained constant is the fact that they're based on silicon wafers but it turns out we don't have to use silicon substrates in fact if we print transistors on another type of material we could get processors that are not only cheaper but bendable that's right while everyone is talking about foldable phone screens scientists have been working on a flexible arm-based processor printed on plastic but how the heck do you put transistors on plastic and why would we want a flexible cpu anyway so it turns out that we've actually been putting transistors onto materials other than silicon for a long time now specifically i'm talking about oxide thin film transistors better known as tfts these have been used for quite a while in run-of-the-mill lcd screens the idea is that instead of silicon the transistors are printed onto some kind of non-conducting substrate such as glass but even though we've been using this tech for displays for a long time full-fledged cpus are a much more complicated ball game kind of like when you get a double reverse triple outer boundary in the eighth inning and the bendable cpu we're talking about today is notable because not only is it well a full-fledged cpu but it uses an existing architecture that's already been put into tons of devices the arm cortex mNUMBER_TOKEN the new chip is essentially an mNUMBER_TOKEN core plus a small amount of memory on a plastic substrate printed using photo lithography meaning the printing process is similar to how conventional cpus are made which you can learn lots more about up in this video the transistors themselves can be made from indium gallium zinc oxide better known as exo again commonly used in tft displays at a low cost of course since we're talking about cheap production methods you might think that the plastic arm as it's called isn't very computationally powerful and well you'd be right it runs at only NUMBER_TOKEN kilohertz and is built on an NUMBER_TOKEN nanometer process which is the same process the original pentiums from NUMBER_TOKEN used great year and the thing isn't even very power efficient despite the fact it uses NUMBER_TOKEN milliwatts of power which seems low it turns out that NUMBER_TOKEN of that is lost to waste heat so yeah it's slow and inefficient so what's the point we'll tell you right after we thank drop for sponsoring this video their pre-onic keyboard mx kit in collaboration with olk b provides excellent build quality compact form factor and an intuitive layout for those looking for a compact typing experience it features a cnc aluminum case with your choice of five colors a new arm processor for more power output and kaijua hot swap sockets for easy switch swapping buy yours today at the link below so remember how we said the cortex mNUMBER_TOKEN is in a huge number of embedded devices already putting the mNUMBER_TOKEN on flexible plastic means a chip that's complex enough to handle more advanced functions could go into many more products especially in cases where silicon is too expensive or too brittle even though the plastic arms implementation of the mNUMBER_TOKEN is quite slow as we said it should still be around NUMBER_TOKEN times as powerful as previous integrated circuits based on plastic plastic arm would have enough computational muscle to be connected to environmental sensors
START_SPONSOR_TOKEN we'll tell you right after we thank drop for sponsoring this video their pre-onic keyboard mx kit in collaboration with olk b provides excellent build quality compact form factor and an intuitive layout for those looking for a compact typing experience it features a cnc aluminum case with your choice of five colors a new arm processor for more power output and kaijua hot swap sockets for easy switch swapping buy yours today at the link below END_SPONSOR_TOKEN