Friday 15 March 2013

Self-healing Microchips—the origin of a new species


Science is getting closer and closer to making 'intelligent' robots that are almost lifelike. Artificial intelligence programs have beaten the best of humans in that good old game of strategy, chess. But try as they might, the most sophisticated of them are unlikely to be classed as living things. The simple reason? Well, they lack the capacity for self repair. In fact the capacity for adaptive self repair has been something that has put living beings on the topmost rung of the ladder. Just one wee little bit of a circuit going awry could spell "curtains" for the best of robots. One wrong line of code could throw the spanner into the works of the best of AI programs. That, then is the "fact of life".

Now engineers at Caltech (California Institute of Technology) have sowed the seeds for the origin of a new species-- a microchip that could learn to heal itself. A self-healing chip is but a few steps short of a self-healing machine, the Holy Grail of robotics and AI. In a typical microchip, there are thousands of pathways by which information can travel, but a single fault can render the whole system inoperative. By a rough count, these days a typical chip may house upwards of 100,000 transistors, the basic building blocks of a chip. All of these transistors might not function simultaneously, though the failure of just one or two could turn the chip into a dud. The researchers wanted to broadly mimic the human brain, which, if one pathway for information flow becomes unavailable, quickly seeks out alternative pathways.

The chip with the "electronic immune system" has a range of on-chip sensors that monitor temperature, current, voltage, and power. The data from the array of sensors is fed into a custom-made Application-Specific Integrated-Circuit (ASIC) unit on the same chip, a central processor that acts as the "brain" of the system. In the event of a failure, the chip's brain draws conclusions based on the aggregate response from the sensors and switches actuators to "reconfigure" the chip's functionality on the fly. "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 one of the designers.
Part of the chip that was 'laser-fried'
-damage from which the chip recovered


In order to demonstrate this self-healing functionality, the research team zapped a high frequency communications chip multiple times with a high power laser, 'frying' many devices on the chip. However, when next switched on, the chip's "brain" swung into action and restored the functionality in about a second, and that too to nearly ideal levels. "...(the ciruits) can now both diagnose and fix their own problems without any human intervention, moving one step closer to indestructible circuits...", was how the lead researcher put it. The team is confident that the self-healing approach can be extended to virtually any other electronic system.

The development, though in its infancy now, is sure to open up a world of possibilities. Making a cyborg like 'Terminator' may not happen overnight, but truly the mind boggles when once considers the future when inanimate systems could "take care of themselves".

Learn more at:

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-self-healing-microchips

http://www.caltech.edu/content/creating-indestructible-self-healing-circuits

Thursday 14 March 2013

'Remote sensing' Electronic Tattoos


Tattoos are as old as mankind, though it was the exposure to the Polynesian practice that had re-ignited interest in tattooing in the West. Tattooing has been practised for centuries in many cultures around the world. The 'skin art' is mostly decorative in purpose. But now medical researchers at the University of Illinois have converted the tattoo into a diagnostic tool.

The electronic circuit 'printed' on skin
The project, pioneered by materials scientist John Rogers, is the latest development in research into flexible "epidermal electronics". This involves flexible circuit boards and electronics that can be printed directly on to the skin of a person, whose health parameters like heart rate and temperature, strain and hydration, could be monitored directly by the sensors and the accompanying circuits, and beamed back to the physician. Techniques have been developed to print circuits directly on to human skin with a rubber stamp. it is then covered with a spray-on bandage to form a protective coating. The ultra-thin mesh electronics operate like a standard computer circuit board – with electrodes, sensors and wireless communication systems.

This development could be the first step in a futuristic system of networked healthcare. With such a "tattoo system" in place, patients could be sent home to recuperate post-surgical procedures and doctors could monitor their progress remotely, with the "printed-tattoo" devices taking over the roles of electromyographs and electrocardiographs, the "big iron" of hospital rooms. The "tattoo" circuits will continue to do their job for a couple of weeks before the skin's natural exfoliation process will cause them to flake off.

That makes one wonder: Is it right to call them tattoos--which are more or less permanent?!

Explore more at:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/mar/13/electronic-tattoo-monitor-patient-symptoms
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tattoo