Soon, self-healing smartphones and computers

Imagine if your smartphone or computer could repair on its own! It  might sound like the stuff of science fiction as engineers at the  California Institute of Technology, for the first time ever, have  developed self-healing integrated chips. It means your smartphones or computers can repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power  to total transistor failure. The team demonstrated this  self-healing capability in tiny power amplifiers, which are so small, in fact, that 76 of the chips-including everything they need to  self-heal-could fit on a single penny. They 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," said  Ali Hajimiri, the Thomas G Myers Professor of Electrical Engineering at  Caltech. "We had literally just blasted half the amplifier and  vaporised many of its components, such as transistors, and it was able  to recover to nearly its ideal performance," said Hajimiri in a  statement. Until now, even a single fault has often rendered an  integrated-circuit chip completely useless. Engineers wanted to give  integrated-circuit chips a healing ability akin to that of our own  immune system-something capable of detecting and quickly responding to  any number of possible assaults in order to keep the larger system  working optimally. The power amplifier they devised employs a  multitude of robust, on-chip sensors that monitor temperature, current,  voltage, and power. The information from those sensors feeds 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. The brain analyses the amplifier's overall performance and determines if it needs to adjust any of the system's actuators-the changeable parts of  the chip. 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. Looking at 20 different chips, the team found that the  amplifiers with the self-healing capability consumed about half as much  power as those without, and their overall performance was much more  predictable and reproducible.   NDTV