Table 1 Advantages of flexible integrated circuits built with metal-oxide TFTs

Feature

PlasticARM (this work)

Flexible 8-bit ALU¹⁶

Dedicated machine learning FlexIC⁷

BNN FlexIC¹⁸

Area (mm²)

59.2

225.6

5.6

5.86

Technology

0.8-μm metal-oxide TFT

5-μm dual-gate organic + metal-oxide TFTs

0.8-μm metal-oxide TFT

0.8-μm metal-oxide TFT

Logic type

Unipolar n-type resistive load

Complementary n-type oxide and p-type organic

Unipolar n-type resistive load

Unipolar n-type resistive load

Supply voltage (V)

3

6.5

4.5

3

Chip pin count

28

30

23

23

Processor

32-bit Arm Cortex-M-based SoC

8-bit ALU + P²ROM

Custom hardware

Custom hardware

Number of devices

56,340 (39,157 TFTs plus 17,183 resistors)

3,504

3,132 (2,084 TFTs + 1,048 resistors)

4,489 (3,028 TFTs + 1,461 resistors)

NAND2-equivalent gate count

18,334

876

1,024

1,421

Max circuit clock frequency (kHz)

29

2.1

104

22

Power consumption (mW)

21

Not reported

7.2

1.1

Power density (mW mm^–2)

0.4

Not reported

1.3

0.2