Semiconductors have already had a very profound effect on society, accelerating scientific research and driving greater connectivity. Future semiconductor hardware will open up new possibilities in quantum computing, artificial intelligence and edge computing, for applications such as cybersecurity and personalized healthcare. By nature of its ethos, open hardware provides opportunities for even greater collaboration and innovations across education, academic research and industry. Here we present Flex-RV, a 32-bit microprocessor based on an open RISC-V (ref. ¹) instruction set fabricated with indium gallium zinc oxide thin-film transistors² on a flexible polyimide substrate, enabling an ultralow-cost bendable microprocessor. Flex-RV also integrates a programmable machine learning (ML) hardware accelerator inside the microprocessor and demonstrates new instructions to extend the RISC-V instruction set to run ML workloads. It is implemented, fabricated and demonstrated to operate at 60 kHz consuming less than 6 mW power. Its functionality when assembled onto a flexible printed circuit board is validated while executing programs under flat and tight bending conditions, achieving no worse than 4.3% performance variation on average. Flex-RV pioneers an era of sub-dollar open standard non-silicon 32-bit microprocessors and will democratize access to computing and unlock emerging applications in wearables, healthcare devices and smart packaging.

半导体已经对社会产生了非常深远的影响，加速了科学研究并推动了更大的连接性。未来的半导体硬件将为量子计算、人工智能和边缘计算等应用开辟新的可能性。就其理念而言，开放式硬件为教育、学术研究和工业领域提供更大的协作和创新机会。在这里，我们介绍了 Flex-RV，这是一款基于开放式 RISC-V（参考文献 ¹）指令集的 32 位微处理器，该指令集由铟镓锌氧化物薄膜晶体管² 在柔性聚酰亚胺衬底上制造，可实现超低成本的可弯曲微处理器。Flex-RV 还在微处理器内部集成了一个可编程机器学习 （ML） 硬件加速器，并演示了扩展 RISC-V 指令集以运行 ML 工作负载的新指令。它经过实现、制造和演示，可在 60 kHz 下运行，功耗低于 6 mW。当组装到柔性印刷电路板上时，其功能在平坦和紧密弯曲条件下执行程序时经过验证，平均性能变化不超过 4.3%。Flex-RV 开创了一个低于美元开放标准非硅 32 位微处理器的时代，并将使计算访问民主化，并解锁可穿戴设备、医疗保健设备和智能包装中的新兴应用。