More to the point...
Will it blend?
Researchers at chip designer Arm have shown off a prototype microprocessor - dubbed PlasticARM - built on flexible plastic, letting it curve around surfaces and even flex backwards and forwards. Fabricated using a combination of metal-oxide, thin-film transistors (TFTs) and a flexible plastic substrate, offered commercially by …
"We envisage that PlasticARM will pioneer the development of low-cost, fully flexible smart integrated systems to enable an 'internet of everything' consisting of the integration of more than a trillion inanimate objects over the next decade into the digital world.
While "smart paper" never really when anywhere and eInk ended up as a cheap shitty low res display for tablets, adding low speed compute and transister layers to thin films has some obvious applications.
Low yield flexible solar membranes are one. Currently one of the issues hampering them is that the panel's yield crashes if they are partially shadowed, and a backing layer could implement a per sub-cell charge controller. Imagine a patio umbrella or the rain fly of a tent that was made of flexible plastic solar solar cells, with some LEDs on the underside, and possibly a switchable polarization layer.
You can make stuff like this currently but the performance isn't stellar in the best of conditions, and crashes hard if there is any shadowing. So small cells and a on the roll controller could switch and balance the loads on the cells to brace up the output, and might be suitable for reel to reel production.
Switchable window tint might be another.
"One of the great advantages of PragmatIC's technology is the cost, both upfront and per unit. In terms of upfront cost the NRE (non-recurring engineering) cost is orders of magnitude lower than conventional silicon. "The simplicity of the process, with only 13 material layers, means that the turnaround time is on the order of days rather than months."
Is this really true in any meaningful sense? From the previous part of the article, it sounds as though it's simple only because it's not possible to make it more complicated. If you made a conventional silicon chip on an 800nm process with only 13 layers and 10,000 transistors, would this new process still be simpler? The complexity of modern chip manufacturing isn't an inherent part of the process, it's just a consequence of trying to squish ever more, and more complicated, parts into an ever small space.