Researchers Flip to the Humble MOS 6502 to Show a Multi-Challenge Foundry Mannequin for Versatile Chips

Researchers from KU Leuven are hoping to extend curiosity in versatile semiconductors — by exhibiting {that a} foundry manufacturing mannequin with a number of completely different initiatives on every wafer is as relevant to versatile chips as it’s to their extra inflexible counterparts.

“We is not going to compete with silicon-based chips, we need to stimulate and speed up innovation primarily based on versatile, thin-film electronics,” says KU Leuven professor Kris Myny, corresponding writer on the paper detailing the crew’s investigation right into a foundry-based mannequin for versatile semiconductors. “This subject can profit vastly from a foundry enterprise mannequin just like that of the traditional chip business.”

A conventional semiconductor chip is constructed on a inflexible silicon wafer at a foundry — with most chip design corporations, together with business giants like AMD and NVIDIA, missing their very own fabrication services and as a substitute sending the designs off for manufacturing at corporations like Taiwan Semiconductor (TSMC). To scale back prices and maximize yields, a single wafer could also be house to a number of completely different chip designs — creating what is named a Multi-Challenge Wafer, or MPW.

This identical mannequin can apply to versatile semiconductors, the researchers argue, the place quite than a inflexible silicon wafer the chips are made on a bendable substrate. To show it, the crew designed an implementation of the basic MOS Expertise 6502 eight-bit microprocessor and had it produced at two completely different versatile chip foundries — one utilizing a wafer with amorphous indium-gallium-zinc-oxide and the opposite a plate with low-temperature polycrystalline silicon. In each circumstances, the 6502 sat on the substrate alongside different initiatives — similar to a conventional silicon foundry wafer.

Whereas the crew readily admits that the 6502, present in beloved classic computing gadgets from Commodore, Apple, and Nintendo, amongst others, is not in excessive demand for performance-sensitive purposes today, the thickness of their versatile implementation — underneath 30 micrometers, lower than the width of a human hair — reveals promise for constructing one thing extra difficult for wearable sensors and different skin-applied gadgets.

They don’t seem to be the primary to construct a bendable model of the 6502, both: three years in the past PragmatIC, which was one of many two corporations chosen to construct the analysis chip together with PanelSemi, teamed up with 6502 co-designer Invoice Mensch to construct their very own implementation on a versatile plastic substrate, and a yr later introduced a partnership with Imec to construct 6502-based versatile chips for energy-efficient Web of Issues (IoT) gadgets.

The crew’s work has been revealed within the journal Nature underneath open-access phrases.