PlasticARMPit: Accelerating the Development of Flexible Integrated Smart Systems

Future flexible electronic devices will be highly integrated, diversified, and interact with the ambient environment by performing intelligent activities such as fingerprint, vein and odour recognition. These devices will require a flexible high-performance, energy-efficient processor, and it is becoming clear that flexible microcontrollers, which are still in research labs, will not meet the computational demands of future smart applications. Hence, there is an immediate need for a flexible high-performance energy-efficient processing engine to deliver these devices. We propose “plastic Neural Networks (NNs)” as the digital processing engine to accelerate the development of flexible integrated smart systems. The NNs are customised for a specific application, capable of operating in extremely parallel fashion to achieve high performance, and consume low power. The project is the first proposal to pioneer digital hardware NNs as de-facto processing engine of the printed electronics world. It will demonstrate this disruptive concept with a prototype consisting of flexible e-nose sensor array coupled with a plastic NN that can be worn under the armpit to recognise the malodour composition.