Reincarnating the 6502 Using Flexible TFT Tech for IoT
fuse.wikichip.org
fuse.wikichip.org
Yes, they are making transistors out of plastic[1]. ”We coat everything on that, then peel it off and reuse the glass a carriers which means we can use silicon equipment.”
That they manage to get this to work at all is amazing. I view this as a technology demonstrator more than anything else. It looks like there's a pent up demand for low end processing that this might fill.
Who knows, maybe Sam Zeloof can use this process in his garage. 8)
1 - https://www.eenewseurope.com/en/first-300mm-fab-for-the-uk/
My dad had a catalog of spare parts from Bosch and a reader, and I loved to spend time with it to look at the diagrams. This was pre-internet days, so this was the way how large catalogs were distributed.
The precision with which they were created was impressive.
These wafers look similar. I wonder how the information density would compare if some of those chips were storage and a couple of them could be used to display the content of the storage.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microform#/media/File:Microfic...
That's a lot of power for 0.072 MHz. Compare [1] It's nice that it's flexible, but for a wearable, you'd only get a few hours on a coin cell.
[1] https://www.st.com/content/st_com/en/products/microcontrolle...
It was thrilling to learn to make things even with basic, but to do much with graphics or games at the time required direct 6502 coding to get decent performance.
Good memories though. So different coding only for joy with no stress or deadlines.
Would be good if the write up could give some context into the bend-ability of this chip.
What interests me is that given the bending radius that you could simply roll up a whole device to some given diameter and be done with it, a typical case would be an aluminum tube that could be very easily totally sealed.
That's really not that impressive, both in speed and power. You can operate 8Bit MCUs clocked at ~50kHz at 100-200µW.
I wonder what that the technology is good for? IGZO is good for large area electronic with low leakage, so I guess it could be used for sensor arrays and similar where you need distributed circuits. Of course, IGZO is already used for display backplanes.
For digital circuits, silicon will most likely beat it in power and cost even for very small designs.
As far as I can see, all benefits of flexibility can be had by just making the non-flexible bit small enough.
(And no, we aren’t there by a wide margin, but I think something like that is part of the vision)
It's just kind of an awkward hack. It's fast though.
Wish WDC had made a "true" 16 or 32-bit 65xx. Forget the mode switching and extend the opcode set (by adding some two-byte instructions via a prefix-byte or something) to add additional 16 and 24-bit register access modes so one could get full linear 24-bit addressing. And let the direct page and stack sit anywhere in the 24-bit address space rather than just in the lowest page.
In the end I think the 65816 is mostly just a 6502 with some extra stuff bolted on the front of the instruction decoder. Quick and dirty, not much of a step up from the various 6502 + external bank switching we saw in the 80s.