How to build a disposable microchip

Many chips like those built by Milltrust’s British Innovation Fund investee company PragmatIC, will be embedded into objects like clothes, food and water-treatment plants. 

EVERY RESEARCH project needs a striking name, and it is hard to think of a better one than “Plastic Armpit”. The idea is to design and build a chip with an electronic nose, which can sample the odours and chemicals in its environment. Such a chip, says James Myers, a senior engineer at Arm, a British-based chip designer, could be usefully attached to all sorts of consumer goods. Its name came from the idea of weaving such a chip into items of clothing, where it could let oblivious wearers know when the need for a shower was becoming urgent.

Despite the jocularity, the project—a collaborative venture between Arm, the University of Manchester, PragmatIC, a firm which makes flexible electronics, and Unilever, a British-Dutch consumer giant—is a serious one. Gartner, a research firm, reckons that 259m PCs were sold last year. Pew, a pollster, puts the number of smartphones in the world at more than 2.5 billion. Arm, whose designs dominate the market for the sorts of low-power microprocessors that go into everything from smartphones to televisions, organises its business around the assumption that there will be a trillion computers in the world by 2035.