Researchers at the IMEC nanotechnology center in Leuven, Belgium have used 4,000 plastic, organic transistors to create a microprocessor that measures roughly two centimeters square, built on top of flexible plastic foil.

Plastic processors could be useful in places where silicon is barred by its cost or physical inflexibility, and the lower cost of the organic materials compared to conventional silicon should make the plastic approach around 10 times cheaper.

A layer of gold electrodes was deposited on top of the foil, followed by an insulating layer of plastic, and then another layer of gold electrodes, along with the plastic semiconductors that make up the processor’s 4,000 transistors.

The prototype chip runs at a speed of six hertz — roughly a millionbillion times slower than a modern desktop machine — and can only process information in eight-bit chunks at most, compared to 128 bits for modern computer processors.