Share the news on July 24 with wechat scanning QR code < / P > < p > to friends and circles of friends < / P > < p > < / P > < p > from computers, mobile phones, cars to washing machines and lamp posts, microchips can now be said to be everywhere, but this is not the real "interconnection of everything". Arm, a British chip design company, recently released a new plastic chip prototype called plastic arm, which can print circuits on plastics, paper and fabrics at low cost to help achieve the goal of interconnection of all things < p > plastic arm is not the first flexible chip, but it is the most complex, with 56340 parts. The microchip contains a 32-bit Cortex-M0 CPU (the cheapest and simplest processor core in the arm Cortex-M Series), 456 bytes of ROM and 128 bytes of ram. It consists of more than 18000 logic gates, and arm says the number is at least 12 times that of previous plastic chips < p > plastic arm was designed by arm in cooperation with pragmatic, a flexible electronics manufacturer. As explained in a paper published by the company's designer in the journal Nature, it has the same functions as silicon-based chip design. For example, during the manufacturing process, plastic arm can only run three test programs hard connected to the circuit, but arm researchers say they are developing future versions to allow the installation of new code < p > platticarm and similar chips are so special because they use flexible components. In platticarm, researchers used metal oxide thin film transistors (TFTs). Unlike processors based on brittle silicon substrates, they can be printed on curved surfaces without degradation. This makes it possible to print processors cheaply on materials such as plastic and paper < p > as the arm researchers explained in their paper, this will allow microchips to be used for various purposes that seem wasteful today. For example, you might print a chip to detect deterioration on each bottle instead of the shelf-life mark. Arm said that this will create a new "interconnected" world. In the next decade, chips will be integrated into "more than one trillion inanimate objects" < p > however, plastic based microchips have major defects and will certainly not replace silicon processors in the short term. In terms of power consumption, density and performance, their efficiency is too low. For example, platticarm consumes 21 MW of power, but 99% of it is basically wasted, and only 1% is captured for calculation. Platticarm is also relatively large, with an area of 59.2 mm2, about 1500 times the size of the silicon-based cortex M0 processor < p > as James Myers, an arm research engineer, said: "platticarm's computing speed will not be fast and will not save energy, but I plan to put it on lettuce to track the shelf life, which will be a good idea. We are still looking for other use cases, just as we explored the use of raw processors in the 1970s. Can this be used for smart packaging? Can the gas sensor tell you what is safer to eat? Can it be used for wearable health patches? These are interesting projects we are considering. "（ Small) < / P > < p >