IEEE Spectrum said the team’s discovery opens the way for implantable devices, on-skin computers, brain-machine interfaces, and soft robotics.

According to the article, UK-based Pragmatic Semiconductor produced an "ultralow-power" 32-bit microprocessor using open-source RISC-V architecture.

According to the chip's inventors, they can make it for less than a dollar, and it shows potential for inexpensive applications like wearable healthcare electronics and smart package labels.

Pragmatic senior director of processor development Emre Ozer said: "We can develop an ECG patch that has flexible electrodes attached to the chest and a flexible microprocessor connected to flexible electrodes to classify arrhythmia conditions by processing the ECG data from a patient."

Detecting normal heart rhythms versus an arrhythmia "is a machine learning task that can run in software in the flexible microprocessor

Pragmatic sought to create a flexible microchip that cost significantly less than a silicon processor. The new Flex-RV device is a 32-bit microprocessor based on the metal-oxide semiconductor indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO). Attempts to create flexible devices from silicon require special packaging for the brittle microchips to protect them from the mechanical stresses of bending and stretching. In contrast, pliable thin-film transistors made from IGZO can be made directly at low temperatures onto flexible plastics, leading to lower costs.

"Our end goal is to democratise computing by developing a licence-free microprocessor," Ozer says.

Other processors have been built using flexible semiconductors, such as Pragmatic's 32-bit PlasticARM and an ultracheap microcontroller designed by Illinois engineers.

Unlike these earlier devices, Flex-RV is programmable and can run compiled programs written in high-level languages such as C. The open-source nature of RISC-V also lets the researchers equip Flex-RV with a programmable machine learning hardware accelerator, enabling artificial intelligence applications.

Each Flex-RV microprocessor has a 17.5 square millimetre core and roughly 12,600 logic gates. The research team found Flex-RV could run as fast as 60 kilohertz while consuming less than six milliwatts of power.

The Pragmatic team found that Flex-RV could still execute programs correctly when bent to a curve with a radius of three millimetres. Depending on the way it was bent, performance varied between a 4.3 per cent slowdown and a 2.3 per cent speedup.