Researchers build a bendable ARM processor, don’t bother to bend it

Enlarge (credit: Biggs, et. al. )

Wearable electronics, like watches and fitness trackers, represent the next logical step after computing went to portable and mobile devices. They’ve sparked an interest in the development of flexible electronics, which could enable wearables to include the things like clothing and backpacks.

Flexible electronics, however, run into a problem: our processing hardware is anything but flexible. Most efforts at dealing with that have involved splitting up processors into a collection of smaller units, linking them along with flexible wiring, and then embedding all the components in a versatile polymer. To an extent, it’s a throwback to the early days of computing, when a floating point unit might reside on a separate chip.

But a group within ARM has now managed to implement one of the company’s smaller embedded designs using flexible silicon. The design works and executes all the instructions you’d expect from it, but it also illustrates the compromises we have to make for truly flexible electronics.