The transistors are based on IGZO (Indium Gallium Zink Oxide), which is a relatively new material and is an amorphous high-channel mobility wide band gap material. The transistors are not as fast as LTPS, but have much lower leakage. Since the material does not have to by crystallized, it can be deposited at fairly low temperatures on plastic subtrate.

You may very well regard IGZO as the plastic electronics killer, because it does everything that PTTT/Pentacene etc. was supposed to do. Noble prize? Let's see.

Sadly, IGZO is not a rival to silicon when it comes to power efficiency, speed, and cost per gate. So these MCUs are nice demonstrators, but the use case is doubtful.

IGZO is great for display, large area sensing and possibly memory.

p.s.: Congrats on the research, very interesting paper! I am long out of the field, but still amazed about the progree being made. I wonder, what does the high ionic conductivity mean to device stability, especially if used with a field effect device?

I can think of plenty of sterile single-use 'use cases' in Medical Devices where a throw away polymer processor would be useful but an existing semi-conductor processor would not make financial sense to use.

Could you provide some examples?

since I have no knowledge in this area I will ask a question that probably doesn't make sense - would these be useful in objects that were very sturdy and shielded from variations in heat and light - or will shielding cause other problem? I'm pretty much considering high cost outdoors equipment. Or given that it's probably high cost the cost of actually using metal ones would be negligible so it wouldn't make sense to skimp?