Researchers build processor from plastic sheets

A crude microprocessor built from two thin sheets of plastic foil may steal some of the spotlight from traditional CPU giants when it debuts at a seminal industry event in February. The International Solid State Circuits Conference will also host papers on a 5.2 GHz processor from IBM and an Intel Itanium chip packing 54 Mbytes cache.

At ISSCC, researchers from Europe will describe an 8-bit, 6 Hz device running a hardcoded program on two sheets of foil just 25 microns thick, using a 10V power supply. The team hails from five organizations including the Imec research center in Belgium and startup Polymer Vision (Eindhoven, Netherlands) which is developing flexible displays.