Imagine that the chips in your smart phone or computer could repair and defend themselves on the fly, recovering in microseconds from problems ranging from less-than-ideal battery power to total transistor failure. It might sound like the stuff of science fiction, but a team of engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), for the first time ever, has developed just such self-healing integrated chips.
This chip can do just that. It was able to heal itself after being cut with a laser. Pretty impressive
A fully-integrated self-healing mm-wave power
amplifier heals process variation, load mismatch, and
transistor failure with on-chip sensors, actuators and an
integrated digital algorithm ASIC without external
calibration. Measurements of 20 chips showed increased RF
power up to 3dB, or reduced DC power by 50% in backoff at
28 GHz. Healing 4-1 VSWR load mismatch for RF and DC
power improvement was verified, and healing after laser
induced transistor failure increased RFpower up to 4.8dB.
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