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Flexible processor technology has enormous potential, that's for sure. Silicon dies quickly reach their limits when it comes to developing the "CPU for everything". The biggest problem is not even that silicon is not flexible. A high-performance CPU could be made so small that it could be surrounded by flexible plastic, making it suitable for a wide range of application scenarios.

No, the problem is rather that the admittedly small die requires more surface area for IO lines, for example, and cutting it out of the wafer requires a certain footprint. You quickly reach regions where you could in principle produce a flexible chip, but the costs would simply be too high in comparison to other approaches.

Samuel K. Moore wrote a beautiful article about a new approach by PragmatIC, who have produced a 4-bit microcontroller on plastic, that could be produced for $0.01.

The whole thing is along the same lines as the Flexible 6502 we reported on in Issue #48, but uses a different technical approach.

Great to see 4 and 8 bit systems finding valid application scenarios even in 2022.