New funds for developing self-healing circuits

9 April 2009

A professor of electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology has been awarded $6 million grant for developing self-healing circuits. The grant will be for a period of four years and Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has awarded it. The work will be carried out on millimeter and microwave frequencies as these are widely used for various applications including communication, imaging, radar etc.

Professor Ali Hajimiri has been nominated for the award and he and his team will work on self-healing mixed-signal integrated circuits or HELICs. This program is designed to continue Moore’s Scaling law. As the transistors run on very high frequencies and within a circuit many transistors might not work perfectly and the team will identify such transistors through sensors and will take appropriate action.

Many times the transistors not work at par or can act in line with actuators that can modify or alter the system and therefore to rectify the problem, self-healing circuits are the best choice before us. Ali Hajimiri has already developed a self-healing circuit that was developed on a single silicon chip in the year 2004 and the present development will allow superior self-healing circuits that will work faster and will be also cheaper. These new circuits are designed to resemble living organisms so that they self-heal and readily adjust to the environment.

Related Posts: