What's next? Smart card with USB?
Ever since the discovery of the field of electronics it has been an industry obsession to make components as small as possible. After reducing footprint sizes to a point that parts have become nearly invisible, ultra-thin devices seem to be the new trend in semiconductor land.
Ever since the discovery of the field of electronics it has been an industry obsession to make components as small as possible. After reducing footprint sizes to a point that parts have become nearly invisible, ultra-thin devices seem to be the new trend in semiconductor land.
With a height of only 0.34 mm (0.013") the Kinetis K22 ARM Cortex-M4 processor by Freescale is as thin as common chicken eggshell, or, as the manufacturer puts it, as thin as a blade of grass. With its 120 MHz core and integrated FPU it is also as sharp as a knife, capable of delivering 1.25 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz. The MCU also includes a full-speed USB device that doesn't need a bulky external crystal. When you know that a chip card is more than twice as thick as this chip, we can fantasize about what may come next. What about a credit card with USB?
With a height of only 0.34 mm (0.013") the Kinetis K22 ARM Cortex-M4 processor by Freescale is as thin as common chicken eggshell, or, as the manufacturer puts it, as thin as a blade of grass. With its 120 MHz core and integrated FPU it is also as sharp as a knife, capable of delivering 1.25 Dhrystone MIPS per MHz. The MCU also includes a full-speed USB device that doesn't need a bulky external crystal. When you know that a chip card is more than twice as thick as this chip, we can fantasize about what may come next. What about a credit card with USB?
