Self-Healing Computer Chip Survives Laser Blast

Self-Healing Computer Chip Survives Laser Blast : Discovery News: "Shoot the Terminator or a Borg, and they repair themselves, and then come back fighting. Imagine if a PC could do the same — survive a hit by a laser blast and then come back processing.




A team at the California Institute of Technology built a computer chip that can take a licking and keep on ticking. It has a set of tiny power amplifiers, an elementary type of circuitry common in everything from your speaker’s amplifier to your phone. The power amplifier uses a set of on-chip sensors that monitor temperature, current, voltage and power. Information from those sensors goes to a custom-made integrated circuit on the same chip. That’s the “brain” of the system. The brain analyzes the amplifier’s performance and checks if it needs adjustment. If there is a problem it can re-route the information to actuators that are working."