 So here's a flexible ARM processor here at the ID TechX show. So who are you? Hi, I'm Chris Faulkner. I'm a VP Technology in ARM. And I just gave a keynote here on IoT and flexible electronics and the future. And one of the things we like about this stuff is that it keeps on continuing on Moore's Law beyond Moore's Law. So we've seen huge progress in plastic electronics over the last few years. Integration densities, functionalities coming up. And we've been working with these guys here, Pragmatic, who are actually the experts at designing plastic electronics. And on this particular piece of plastic they've put down a whole bunch of ARM microcontrollers. This is the ARM one? This is the ARM one. And they've also brought a whole bunch of other things that they've built. So this is the one that Sophie Wilson thought of. And Steve Ferber actually designed and everything. They have the same functionality? Well, it's 20 years later, but yes. 20 or 30, right? Yeah, yeah. So this is actually a Cortex-M based product. So although it has a complexity similar to the ARM one, it actually is based on the latest Cortex-M architecture alarm. So it's a full 32-bit? Yes. 32-bit microprocessor system on chip. So it includes the memory as well. So this is kind of like a parallel Moore's Law, right? Because Moore's Law and regular silicon is going in one way and this is... Yeah, well, in plastic integration densities there is a Moore's Law. It's not Moore's Law, it's somebody else's law, but it is exponentially improving. And that's what we are seeing here. How were the previous prototypes? What was the rate of improvement in them? So I think the first version of this we did about two years ago that Mike Muller introduced at TechCon was about seven square centimetres. And we're now, as you can see, down to about one square centimetre. And actually we have a version... The next version of this is about half the size again. So we've got something in the region of a 10x reduction footprint in the space of a couple of years. So who are you? So I'm Scott White, the CEO of Pragmatic. So we've been working with ARM for the last couple of years. ARM actually became an investor in Pragmatic in 2014. And we've been working on a range of projects, but in particular looking at how technology can be applied to implement standard microprocessor architectures such as ARM has and using that as a vehicle to really push the boundaries of the complexity and functionality that can be implemented with our thin, flexible electronics. So the potential here, if this works out, that this could be in the table, in the floor, in the chair and everywhere because it's so cheap, right? That's right. If you look at the classic electronics industry view of the Internet of Things, it's very much focused on quite complex products like lighting or cars or homes or things like that. And we're really looking to push that to everyday objects. So the things that we interact with multiple times an hour or multiple times a minute, you know, so every day of the year, how do those things have some intelligence, some understanding of their environment and the ability to interact with each other and with the humans that are using them? So is this a requirement to make the 100 billion or trillion ARM processors happen? Something like this is great. Yeah, that's why we're looking at this. It's one of those technologies that if it takes off, it can be incredibly cheap. It allows you to customize your designs. You don't have to have high volume to be cost-effective. You can integrate other logic onto this and sensing around it. So it has some of those properties that could become quite interesting. And if you can certainly build these at the few-cent level, there's nothing to stop it to proliferate. And who are you? I'm Schwan de Olivier Ravi, business development. So this is an R&D project as my colleagues mentioned. At some point in a to-be-defined future, the few square centimeters will become few square millimeters. And then it may become commercially viable and interesting to have ARM processors at one center there about in almost any object. So there could be a Cortex M0 class or something in a few square millimeter-shrinked plastic? At some point in the future, yes. So the cost will go down. The performance and the power budget will go down accordingly. In parallel, it will move more slow. So it is the same logic with the 30, 40 years difference. So how is it possible to do this? How does it work? So pragmatics key innovations really are in the device architectures and the processing technologies that allow us to do electronics very accurately on plastic. So we can achieve similar kinds of progression in feature size and yield and performance and so forth that Silicon has done. But do that with materials on very thin film plastic. So as you can see here, this is actually our latest generation material set, which is actually less than 10 microns thick for the entire material stack. So that includes the plastic substrate, which is actually most of that, and all of the electronics including the interconnect layers and the devices within the IC. So as you can imagine doing that on something that is that thin and flexible and as easy as Silicon where you have a nice rigid wafer that stays put exactly where you left it and therefore you can align to very precise accuracy. So our key innovations really are how we pattern accurately on these kinds of materials and in particular how we ensure very good registration between the different layers so that we can actually get very good yield, very good consistency in performance characteristics and therefore make an integrated circuit. So I don't ask too much, but I'm wondering is it just one layer? No, it's actually about a 10 layer. 10 layer on plastic? How's that possible? Just by a lot of hard work really on developing. Different processing steps. You have different material layers for the semiconductor, the dielectric, the equivalent of the poly layers in a silicon stack and so forth. So there's a lot of materials innovation obviously in actually getting the materials right with appropriate characteristics but then also building up that stack is somewhat different to silicon where you're actually adding materials layer by layer at a time. In one sense it actually, certain things become easier because we can add additional layers very easily into that stack because it's just adding a few more steps in the process doing the same thing again to add another metal interconnect layer for example. So you print the whole thing in one go or you have to come over back? Printed layer by layer. Layer by layer, precisely on plastic. And I'll say that's where the key innovation is, is how you get the precision in each of those layers and also in the registration between the layers even though the plastic might be moving or expanding or contracting in between those process steps. So we're here at the ID Tech show, there's lots of stuff about printer electronics and stuff so you have to get the cutting edge printer and all that stuff and the materials. Printing is a somewhat vague term that's used to define lots of things. Some people define what we do as printing, others don't. We don't get very involved in the religious argument of what it's called. We use a mix of print-like technologies as well as conventional electronics processing technology. In fact the company name Pragmatic is very representative of the approach we've taken. It's all about achieving the right kind of materials with the right kind of patterning, the right kind of performance. Whether we use printing or not, actually our customers don't care. Of course. Is there more you can show here? There's some NFC devices for example. So this is a printed antenna. It's one of our devices that does the harvesting here and does the bridge on the antenna at the same time. So it's a dual function of the electronic harvesting and driving as well as the bridge which reduces the integration for such device. So this is on PEN 50 microns. Our device is there. So the separate is PEN. Our device was on PEN and we moved to polyamide in that case. Right. And these? So those are logic devices. Those are non-gauge, non-gauge flip flops and so on that are processed on a wafer and then they can be laser diced and picked in place to create subsystems and integrated in traditional electronics way. So it's worth clarifying that although what we're working on with ARM in doing a full microprocessor is where we see the future evolving the near-term applications tend to require much simpler functionality. Again, you know, very close comparables if you go back to the 1970s in silicon. You know, microprocessors started to grow but you actually had a lot of applications that were solved with discrete components and discrete logic gates and so forth. So we have similar products where you have individual logic gates that can be easily mixed and matched to create certain functionality as well as basic sort of standard product types like RFID or NFC that meet the requirements of what people want to deploy in applications today. Are some of your parts on the market? There's a number that are in pilot trials. We're actually in the process at the moment of scaling up production capacity for full commercial rollout. So we actually just announced that on Monday that we're investing now in our first volume production line called the FlexLogic System which will be commissioned through 2017 and so by 2018 we'll have a production capacity of over a billion ICs per annum. A billion? 2018? Yeah, next year. And a billion sounds like a lot but actually in the context of the markets we're going after that tends to be you know, entry level if you like for what people actually need. So that's a billion more licensed sold every year? Well, eventually. The units will not be ARM processors, obviously. Are you encouraging them to get ARM Cortex A73 and Mali GPU on here? No. I'd be very happy with the M0 or an M-1 happening. In my view it's all about some level of general purpose processing to be available and then this is an ideal substrate for customization around it. I don't think this game is all about high performance, this is about low cost and customizability and integration. I hope that with a new kind of like structure in ARM but now you're screening up innovation and you're helping to get things like this sooner and faster out there. Oh yeah, that's something we've always wanted and we're still working hard on it, yeah? All right. If you have something like this, where do you connect it? How would it work? So you can very easily see actually the contact pads around the outside of the IC layout. So as Chris mentioned, it's not just the cost and form factor of the individual IC that is interesting but actually the ease of integration into noble form factors. So this is essentially a fully packaged device already. It doesn't need to be put inside a plastic box with metal legs on it to stick on a PCB. That can be basically cut out from that plastic and directly stuck on with a conductive adhesive onto a flexible substrate like an antenna or something like that. So it allows very easy integration so that the entire form factor of the end product can be thin, flexible and very low cost. So you can glue that, stick that together with a flexible display on top and a flexible battery under and that's it? You could, yes. And a few more flexible things. Any flexible things as you like. Or non-flexible things. Interestingly we've seen actually in many applications the thinness is what people are really interested in even more so than the flexibility. So be able to embed functionality within a PCB for example. And so you get a semi-active PCB for integrating glue logic in between high-end ASICs or things like that. So there's a whole range of applications for this, some of which we've only just started to really tap into understanding what people want to do with the technology. So how are you going to optimize the yield and the life, the reliability and stuff like that? So fundamentally because the materials are flexible and plastic, it is already quite robust. In fact we've seen that in certain applications that just that resistance to flexing obviously but also to impact, to dropping things like that silicon is a big advantage in certain applications. In terms of lifetime that's something we'll have to build up statistical data over time. We know the fundamentals of the materials are quite good for extended lifetime applications but we obviously don't have the 40 or 50 years of silicon history to be able to prove that to go into long lifetime. But actually if you look at most of the applications that want to use this technology they tend to be comparatively short lifetime compared to what you were used to. This is not generally oriented towards an electronics product that you buy and what to use for the next 10 years. It's oriented towards putting it into as you said earlier, tables, chairs packets, cornflakes, whatever else things that have a relatively short life in how we're interacting with them so they might be on the shelf in a retail store for a few months and then might be used for a couple of days a business card or something like that. Is it recyclable material all this you can just reuse? Most of it is. The semiconductor is not organic so we are inorganic semiconductor so that gives us a bit of leeway compared to organic materials in the life cycle and shelf life and functional life as well. Alright, so really looking forward to the 2018 billion, billion chips that you're going to print out. Great.