How to build a disposable microchip

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The idea is to design and build a chip with an electronic nose, which can sample the odours and chemicals in its environment.
Such a chip, says James Myers, a senior engineer at Arm, a British-based chip designer, could be usefully attached to all sorts of consumer goods.

Plastic Armpit is an attempt to design the sort of chip that might meet that demand. The goal is to produce a robust, bendable, mass-producible computer, complete with sensors and the ability to communicate with the outside world, for less than $0.01 apiece. A prototype version, shown off at Arm’s headquarters in Cambridge, looks like a stiffer-than-usual piece of tape festooned with circuit traces.

Arm, whose designs dominate the market for the sorts of low-power microprocessors that go into everything from smartphones to televisions, organises its business around the assumption that there will be a trillion computers in the world by 2035.
Plastic Armpit is an attempt to design the sort of chip that might meet that demand.
The chip in the Plastic Armpit is cheap and simple.
But how to do so on such a simple chip?
The chip uses a simple form of machine learning called a naive Bayesian classifier.
Flexibility of use was sacrificed, too: to keep things as cheap and simple as possible the algorithm is etched directly into the plastic, meaning the chips are not reprogrammable.
A chip designed to monitor the chemicals given off by strawberries would be useless for chicken.
“If you want it to do something new, you’ll need to design and print a new circuit,” says Mr Myers.
That approach has attracted interest from DARPA , the Pentagon’s most ambitious research outfit, which is looking into ways to do simple, quick chip design as part of its $1.5bn Electronics Resurgence Initiative.
A reliable source of power means the chip can keep a constant eye on the things it is looking after.
The chip has an antenna etched onto its plastic substrate to allow it to communicate with the outside world.
Some chips are already capable of harvesting more common sorts of ambient energy, capturing everything from sunlight to heat to vibration.
Self-powering chips would be especially useful, says Mr Johnson, for situations where battery replacement is a chore—monitoring devices in structures such as bridges or tunnels

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