This New Computer Chip Can Heal Itself

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.

You can read more here, or read the full paper here.