SHF: Small: Printed Computer Systems

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While computing appears to be ubiquitous in today's society and economy, a large number of important domains are still minimally touched. Consider the over 10-trillion dollar fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) market, for example. Disposables such as packaged foods, beverages, toiletries, over-the-counter drugs, and other consumables are sold largely without any embedded computing devices that could help with identification and tracking, quality monitoring, brand authentication, or interactivity. The primary reason why FMCG domains as well as domains such as low-end healthcare (e.g., bandages and wound dressings), agriculture, and environment have not seen much penetration of computing is the cost limitation of today's silicon-based computing systems. Silicon-based systems continue to cost much more than the cost requirements of these domains. For example, item-level tagging of several FMCG products must have costs equivalent to that of a barcode, which silicon-based systems cannot meet due to the high manufacturing, testing, and assembly costs of such systems. Printed electronics has emerged as promising technology to target such application domains. Printing technologies often rely on maskless, portable, and additive manufacturing methods which can greatly reduce costs and production timelines. Such technologies also lead to devices that are conformable and nontoxic. This work will focus on making this method cheap, reliable and flexible. The outcomes can ensure electronic tagging of all components and parts of the manufacturing economy. Students will be trained in a unique and up-and-coming interdisciplinary area at the intersection of architecture, circuits, and materials science. Prior work on printing active electronics has largely focused on fabricating simple circuits. No prior work has explored the architecture, design, or optimization space of printed computer systems, e.g., microprocessors and accelerators. It is not surprising since such exploration requires Process Design Kits (PDKs) that have started becoming available only recently. A synthesis and physical design standard cell library is a pre-requisite for an architectural exploration. This project will develop standard cell libraries for Electrolyte Gated FET and CNT-thin film transistor printed technologies calibrated with fabrication measurements. These libraries (to be made public for broader use) are critical for design space exploration of printed computer systems. The investigator will develop and prototype different microarchitectural building blocks of a printed computer system. Building blocks to be developed and prototyped include instruction and data memory, ALUs, etc., for printed microprocessors, and decision trees and perceptrons for printed machine learning accelerators. These building blocks will then be used, in conjunctions with the developed standard cell libraries, to explore the design space of printed computer systems. Expected outcome of the exploration includes instruction set architecture and microarchitectural design principles for printed microprocessors and accelerators, and optimizations to minimize area and power of printed hardware. Overall, the research will help democratize hardware fabrication making computing ubiquitous even in disposable ultra-low-cost domains.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.