Engineers build electronic chips that repair themselves

[geodude]

Really amazing stuff here

Caltech engineers build electronic chips that repair themselves

Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
The team, made up of members of the High-Speed Integrated Circuits laboratory in Caltech's Division of Engineering and Applied Science, has demonstrated this self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers. The amplifiers are so small, in fact, that 76 of the chips-including everything they need to self-heal-could fit on a single penny. In perhaps the most dramatic of their experiments, the team destroyed various parts of their chips by zapping them multiple times with a high-power laser, and then observed as the chips automatically developed a work-around in less than a second. "It was incredible the first time the system kicked in and healed itself. It felt like we were witnessing the next step in the evolution of integrated circuits," says Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G. Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering at Caltech. "We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and vaporized many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able to recover to nearly its ideal performance.
Interestingly, the chip's brain does not operate based on algorithms that know how to respond to every possible scenario. Instead, it draws conclusions based on the aggregate response of the sensors. "You tell the chip the results you want and let it figure out how to produce those results,"

Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2013-03-caltech-se ... s.html#jCp

[meccalli]

Singularity, it's coming. O.o

[PariaMan]

Judgement day is at hand!

[black start]

the end is near....

[TRENDSETA]

Any timeframe as to when they will become self aware ?
brb stocking up on guns and ammo

[jm3]

this is by far the most dangerous development in electronics,
terminators that won't stay down is really bad.

[toybago]

*best Arnold Schwarzenegger voice*...i'll be back.....

[flower95]

going to watch terminator 1,2,3 and 4 now.

[Strugglerzinc]

What sorcery is this?

Next you'll be talking about cars that drive themselves?

[sMASH]

this is quite disturbing. i thought that the next step would have been a processor so powerful that it would seem to make its own decisions, then replicate. this is far beyond that.

[geodude]

yeah we gonna dead

[Cooloh]

Wow..... Stock up on canned food and rubbers.. -_-

[toyota2nr]

^^ what you need rubbers for ?

[hustla_ambition101]

^^ what you need rubbers for ?

For Cooloh

[toyota2nr]

It's judgement day so you have to procreate and expand the species.

[grimreaper009]

Wow..... Stock up on canned food and rubbers.. -_-

......d man keeping protection...safety first

[fokhan_96]

yeah we gonna dead