Communications of the ACM
Creating Indestructible Self-Healing Circuits
A scanning electron microscope view of some of the damage Caltech engineers intentionally inflicted on their self-healing power amplifier using a high-power laser. The chip was able to recover from complete transistor destruction.
Credit: Jeff Chang and Kaushik Dasgupta/Caltech
California Institute of Technology (Caltech) researchers say they have developed self-healing integrated chips that can automatically repair themselves.
During testing, the researchers destroyed various parts of the chips by zapping them with high-powered lasers, and then observed as they developed a work-around in less than a second. We "blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance," says Caltech professor Ali Hajimiri.
The chips rely on sensors that monitor temperature, current, voltage, and power. The information from the sensors feeds into a custom application-specific integrated-circuit (ASIC) unit on the chip, a central processor that acts as the brain of the system.
"We have designed the system in a general enough way that it finds the optimum state for all of the actuators in any situation without external intervention," says Caltech's Steven Bowers.
By demonstrating that the self-healing capability works well in an advanced system, the researchers hope to show that the self-healing approach can be extended to other electronic systems. "Bringing this type of electronic immune system to integrated-circuit chips opens up a world of possibilities," Hajimiri says.
From Caltech
View Full Article
Abstracts Copyright © 2013 Information Inc., Bethesda, Maryland, USA
No entries found