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?