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