Starting all over again on plastic: Arm

Julien Happich, EETimes Europe, Nov. 24, 2015 – 

Reviewing over 30 years of Arm's history during Arm TechCon, CTO Mike Muller put side by side the Arm1 designed at the 3000nm (3um) node with 25k transistors and the Cortex M0's 48k transistors now designed at the 20nm node.

And to better put things in perspective, celebrating the 25th anniversary of the company's founding, Muller had set to pick 2um design rules to build a small SoC around a Cortex M0 and exhibit the result to the conference attendees.

"You don't put many SoCs on a six-inch wafer at the 2um node", he said, showing a nearly transparent sheet with about 5 or 6 "dies", each holding the Cortex M0 and enough memory and enough I/Os to boot and make an LED flash. But as Muller flexed the wafer back and forth, he revealed the Cortex M0 blocks had been built on a sheet of plastic, using plastic transistors instead of silicon.

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