Design & Reuse

ARM shows first plastic M0+ microcontroller

ARM has developed the first full 32bit microcontroller built on a flexible plastic material.

www.eenewseurope.com, Jul. 21, 2021 – 

The PlasticARM consists of 56,340 NMOS transistors and resistors and is built on a plastic substrate developed by UK foundry PragmatIC Semiconductor in Cambridge.

The resulting microcontroller, detailed in the journal Nature today after six years of development, includes a 32bit CPU, Nested Vector Interrupt Controller (NVIC) for handling interrupts from external devices, peripherals, memories and AHB-lite bus interface as well as a read only memory with 456 bytes that holds three test programs using the ARMv6-M instruction set and the standard ARM toolchain.

The whole system-on-chip runs at a clock rate of 29kHz from a 3V supply and consumes 21mW, dominated by the static power, with the processor accounting for 45 percent, memories 33 percent and peripherals 22 percent.

click here to read more...