A breakthrough has been made in the field of silicone made chips as researchers have developed a new kind of ‘self healing chips that are capable of repairing themselves within a few microseconds. The chips are capable of self healing from faults caused by complete transistor failure as well as power issues.
The new chip technology is developed by California Institute of Technology (Caltech). How this works is pretty simple, once damaged the chips find a way to instantly develop a workaround for the damaged part and continue working even after damage. Although its not exactly the kind of ‘self healing’ you might have expected but it is still a breakthrough that will change the way electronic devices work. This can be related to the working of human bodies as these new chips find an alternate way of keeping the processing going, just like our body that also features self healing capabilities – but on a way more advanced level.
The chips have been programmed to get the desired results and scientists after feeding the relevant data leave it on the chip to decide how it wants to alternate things in order to keep working despite the damages. The self healing chips are capable of addressing four classes of problems which include
- Static variations caused due to variation across different sub-components
- Long-term aging problems caused due to changes in the internal properties of the system
- Short-term variations induced by environmental conditions
- Accidental or deliberate destruction of parts of the circuits.
Not only did scientists demonstrated the working of their self healing chips after blasting them with lasers but they also demonstrated their research using the high frequency integrated chips, which proves that their technology of self healing chips is also capable of working in advanced systems.
For all you interested in technicalities of this project head over to this detailed PDF explaining how this works.