Self-healing chips survive repeated LASER BLASTS

[silicon_toad2000]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/11/caltech_self_healing_chips/

Not quite self healing, but learning to use the right hand when the left hand is destroyed with a laser.
Ha ha maybe they could codename it skywalker

Modern high-speed integrated circuits can be fragile things. Even a single fault can often render them completely inoperable. But a team of researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) says it has developed an "immune system" for chips that can allow circuits to route around problems and keep working in the face of failures – even ones as catastrophic as being blasted with a high-energy laser.

The team demonstrated the technology using a millimeter-wave power amplifier – a type of cutting-edge circuit used for next-generation communications, imaging, and sensing applications.

Even after they zapped the chip repeatedly with a laser, utterly destroying some of its components, the self-healing system was able to detect the faults, route around them, and continue to function at near-optimal efficiency.

"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, a professor of electrical engineering at Caltech.

The system works by equipping the power amplifier with a collection of on-chip sensors that monitor current, voltage, power, and temperature. The data from these low-power sensors is then fed into a custom on-chip ASIC that controls the self-healing process.

[silicon_toad2000]

sorry, warning 'dad joke'

[White Stripes]

this would be great for nasa but i have a funny feeling the likes of intel will just use it to make more celerons from bad pentium (or whatever) chips ....

[GhostShip]

To be able to work around any damage there must be redundancy inside the chip, with a processor running multiple cores I suspect that would work as would Ram arrays where a software routine could detect damaged location but aside from those two examples I'm not sure many chips have such redundancy.

[silicon_toad2000]

I think they're saying the chip is able to reroute within the core itself to exclude damaged transistors

[GhostShip]

Which by definition involves having other transistors to route though, redundancy in plain speech. The only miniscule innovation in this announcement is that they are going to add something previously done in software into an internal routine with its then enhanced core access.

Organisations seem forever to be reinventing the wheel and hyping announcements simply because this not-new-tech will be sold off and fancy announcements help keep the sale price high.

I wonder what else "new" they have "invented" thats just a rehash of older tech.

[silicon_toad2000]

given that the transistor count on modern cpu's is into the billions, an alternate route through the chip wouldn't be too hard to find.
I haven't seen any software that can do the same thing at that level.

I can't wait. When overclocking a chip it's only one signal across the chip getting lost that causes an error. if they can be rerouted, the limits on processing caused my heat stress will be somewhat mitigated.

in my mind the closest thing would be the internet, take out a node somewhere and traffic just goes around.

[GhostShip]

From the laser tests employed and the circuit under test I'm favouring the satellite market where cosmic rays are likely to do the same style of pinpoint damage and where the failure of a component can be mission critical, there does have to be a sub-level routine operating inside this type of equipment as there are sensors embedded that are mentioned in the original quote and thus it makes sense to use them to smartly control the routing, the alternative is dumb routing with each pathway self testing itself, a far from desirable method but still workable I suppose, for space work I would suggest the field effect transistor be employed as its cell style substrate construction is able to absorb some level of damage before a cascade and eventual overload occurs, now back in the old days we had miniature vacuum valves and those too are fairly resilient but they do eat a lot of power and thus place a burden on the power collection side of things, using all this power saving silicon chip based equipment means cheaper initial cost satellite's but as they have doubtless found reduced reliability, the one key element of these chips is in fact not even part of it, the quartz crystal that delivers the clock pulses to everything, in yet another reinvention of old news we heard recently that by placing an android based phone into a fridge researchers where able to hack into them bypassing some of the security, this trick is way old and well know to car radio thieves from way back in the 80s and relies on the erratic nature of the clock circuitry at low temperatures, its often used as a research tool now under the name of "glitching" which is the purposeful generation of differing frequency spikes into a clocking circuit to cause program malfunction in the circuit it drives, whatever will they get up to next eh 

[silicon_toad2000]

yeah i got lost about where it said cosmic rays

[GhostShip]