Electronic 'noses' in our clothes can let wearers know when they need a shower
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.
Plastic Armpit is an attempt to design the sort of chip that might meet that demand. The goal is to produce a robust, bendable, mass-producible computer, complete with sensors and the ability to communicate with the outside world, for less than $0.01 apiece. A prototype version, shown off at Arm’s headquarters in Cambridge, looks like a stiffer-than-usual piece of tape festooned with circuit traces.
The chip in the Plastic Armpit is cheap and simple. Its logic gates, the basic components of information processing, are crude things as big as those that were standard in the 1970s, and it has only 1,000 of them. The sensors, each tuned to a different class of odiferous chemical, are simple too, generating imprecise, rough and ready signals. Most computer scientists would look to the modern cleverness of machine learning to make up for the sensors’ deficiencies.
Since chip design is expensive, and chip designers scarce, he and his team have been working on software tools to simplify that task. The idea is to describe a new algorithm in Python, a widely used programming language, and then have software turn it into a circuit diagram that can be fed into Pragmatic’s chipmaking machines. That approach has attracted interest from, the Pentagon’s most ambitious research outfit, which is looking into ways to do simple, quick chip design as part of its $1.
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