A Really Flexible Microcontroller
American Semiconductor has announced the FleX-MCU product family. The new FleX-MCU device is the world’s first physically flexible microcontroller fabricated using the manufacturer's FleX silicon-on-polymer process. It is an 8-bit RISC device with 8 KB embedded RAM operating at up to 20 MHz, with a 1.2 V core and 2.5 V I/O. It features several serial interface peripherals, including UART, I²C and SPI.
FleX-MCU is the initial product of a family of physically flexible ICs. The FleX IC roadmap includes microcontrollers, analog-to-digital converters, RF wireless communication devices and non-volatile memory.
According to the company, the FleX-MCU device is a good example of the capabilities of the FleX silicon-on-polymer process, which can be applied to a variety of standard SoI wafers from any commercial wafer foundry or IDM. This allows customers to create their own custom FleX ICs in addition to using standard catalog products.