

The world's smallest ARM chip announced, designed for swallowable computers - zaaaaz
http://wired.com/design/2013/02/freescales-tiny-arm-chip/

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Kliment
ARM processors on that scale (2.17x2.32mm package) are commercially available
today. The LPC1102LVUK from NXP for example. I don't really see why a chip
that is only marginally smaller (1.9x2mm) and not available anywhere is
getting this much attention.

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drhayes9
Forgive my ignorance if I missed your point, but this is more of a SOC than
just a processor; from the article: "The KL02 has 32k of flash memory, 4k of
RAM, a 32 bit processor, and peripherals like a 12-bit analog to digital
converter and a low-power UART built into the chip."

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Kliment
The LPC1102 has more or less all of those things as well. The ADC is not as
high resolution, but that's really it. You can head over to Mouser and buy it
for a couple of dollars and use it immediately (product number
771-LPC1102UK118). In comparison, the chip mentioned in the article is
essentially a one-off run for a specific unnamed customer, and does not, for
all practical purposes, exist to mere mortals like us.

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ignostic
These small developments are hugely exciting to me, primarily because they
move us a little closer to the inevitable future of biological machines in our
bodies.

Imagine little robots that crawl through your veins clearing out cholesterol,
or hunting down cancer cells and signaling the immune system to attack them.
We'll get there - probably sooner than most people think.

~~~
Someone
I think that, if we mamage to do that, the biochemists will win that race, not
the lithographers.

Veins have the (for this goal) unfortunate property of repeatedly splitting
into less wide veins. I think macrophages are the largest cells in the blood;
they typically are 20 micrometer or 2E-5m in diameter. To get there, this
thing would have to shrink by a factor of 100 linearly, or 10,000 in area.
That's about 13 Moore's law iterations or 20-ish years.

I doubt we will get those from silicon. And that's ignoring the fact that
capillaries are 5-10 micrometer; AFAIK, lots of cells have to fold to get
through them.

Because of that, this 'ingestible' claim aims more at stuff working in your
guts than at stuff making it into the bloodstream that way.

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thelucky41
The article's title, "Freescale’s Insanely Tiny ARM Chip Will Put the Internet
of Things Inside Your Body" is entirely misleading. Has the IoT term really
been watered down this much from its technical definition? The chip in
question lacks the power necessary to support a full IP stack, which is
necessary for there to be integrated with other things in an Internet. Perhaps
the chip is marketed with a communication application in mind, but having
devices talk to each other does not make it an Internet of Things.

~~~
vardump
You don't need a full IP stack in order to do something useful. 32 kB flash
and 4 kB RAM is more than enough for basic IP-networking.

<http://www.rowley.co.uk/msp430/uip.htm> \- requires less than 2 kB RAM, 12916
bytes of flash.

<http://dunkels.com/adam/miniweb/> \- a minimal "web server", supports only
one connection at a time among other restrictions. But it needs only 30 bytes
of RAM. Yes, 30 bytes, not kilobytes.

~~~
adunk
Author of miniweb and uIP here. uIP is a real IPv4 stack, with all the needed
bells and whistles, but miniweb really is only a super-specific proof-of-
concept that is not particularly useful for anything else than demonstrating
that it can be done.

While something like uIP definitely can be used (and is being used) for IoT
applications, uIP only is an IPv4 endpoint. Most IoT applications have a
wireless communication medium which by its nature is fluctuating and
unpredictable, so you'll typically want to have support for a self-healing
wireless mesh network. Such a mesh network adds a bit of complexity, code
footprint, and memory usage. And since existing low-power meshing standards
like IETF RPL are defined for IPv6 and not IPv4, you need to have support for
IPv6 as well. So in the end, the nice and small footprint of uIP will have
grown. Also, the footprint for uIP given on the Rowley page are for the stack
alone, and does not include things like radio drivers or an OS scheduler.

For a full-mesh low-power IPv6 IoT system, a more realistic figure is what we
have in Thingsquare Mist (<http://thingsquare.com/mist/>), where mesh nodes
with a full Contiki OS and IPv6 support have a code footprint closer to 50k
than 12k. That said, we have successfully been running Thingsquare Mist on
devices with 32k flash and 4k RAM, like the KL02 ARM device in the article.
But this has been for non-mesh fringe nodes that only used UDP/IPv6 multicasts
to communicate with its immediate neighbors, and no mesh networking.

~~~
carterschonwald
very cool. thanks for sharing. Whats a good starting point to understand the
network engineering going on at this resource regime?

~~~
adunk
Just a few quick pointers from the top of my head:

Nice starting point to get a feeling for power/throughput trade-offs in low-
power wireless networking: <http://sing.stanford.edu/pubs/sing-08-00.pdf>

Sensys 2008 paper about web services for tiny IoT systems:
[http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/zhao/pubs/tws0...](http://research.microsoft.com/en-
us/um/people/zhao/pubs/tws08.pdf)

Proceedings of the IEEE 2010 article on IPv6 for low-power wireless:
[http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jwhui/pubs/jhui-
ieeeproc112010.p...](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~jwhui/pubs/jhui-
ieeeproc112010.pdf)

Sensys 2011 papers on trade-offs and interoperability of RPL mesh routing for
low-power IPv6 and on TCP for low-power wireless:
<http://dunkels.com/adam/ko11beyond.pdf>
<http://dunkels.com/adam/duquennoy11lossy.pdf>

There are also two books on the subject and a bunch of relevant papers on the
Contiki website: <http://6lowpan.net/the-book/>
<http://www.thenextinternet.org/> <http://www.contiki-os.org/support.html>

(Full disclosure: I'm a co-author on a bunch of those last pointers.)

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carterschonwald
Thanks! (Thats part of why I asked!)

I'm actually slowly spending a bit of time on the side chewing on how to write
a simple user land network stack (mostly because I want to really understand
standard transport protocol semantics and performance), so looking at the low
power / embedded regime and trying to understand that piece too is just kinda
fun :)

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akurilin
I feel that at this point the bottleneck is our ability to safely and
reversibly enhance human bodies with all of the amazing technology we've
created in the past few decades. Maybe this has always been the case, but it
seems ever more so now.

I can certainly foresee future technology visionaries' frustration with having
amazing nano-scale machines with which they want to experiment and push
humanity's boundaries, but no way to guarantee that there won't be severe
consequence to one's health on the long term.

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Tekker
The chip is small, but the USB connection is a b*tch.

Really, though, it gives rise to other potential dangers (not that that's a
reason to not do it). Imagine a USB flash drive with a full computer behind it
(but so small you'd not know it was there).

There are real uses that would benefit greatly from this, such as artificial
eyes that could do whole image processing and send it on to the brain.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Imagine a USB flash drive with a full computer behind it?

<http://www.fxitech.com/>

Is $200.

~~~
cookingrobot
$34 <http://www.amazon.com/dp/B008BFXOZE>

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trendspotter
Interesting. Freescale's original press release didn't mention that the chip
was designed for swallowable computers:
[http://media.freescale.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=196520&p=irol...](http://media.freescale.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=196520&p=irol-
newsArticle&ID=1789231)

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lightblade
Now, just strap a 2 pound battery to it and you'll be set.

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damian2000
It would be good if they could figure out a way to use our body's electricity,
no idea how though.

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aeontech
There are studies underway about converting body glucose into electricity.
Fascinating stuff.

[http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/technology-1/powered-by-lobster-
sc...](http://www.cbc.ca/strombo/technology-1/powered-by-lobster-scientists-
generate-electricity-from-living-beings.html)

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IheartApplesDix
Talk about Trusted Platforms, how do I add the FDA's signing cert to my immune
system?

