microchip tagged posts

Illustration shows how hydrogen ions (red dots), controlled by an electric voltage, migrate through an intermediate material to change the magnetic properties of an adjacent magnetic layer(shown in green).
Credit: Courtesy of the researchers, edited by MIT News

A new approach to controlling magnetism in a microchip could open the doors to memory, computing, and sensing devices that consume drastically less power than existing versions. The approach could also overcome some of the inherent physical limitations that have been slowing progress in this area until now.

Researchers at MIT and at Brookhaven National Laboratory have demonstrated that they can control the magnetic properties of a thin-film material simply by applying a small voltage...

By splitting programs across a large number of processor cores, the KiloCore chip designed at UC Davis can run at high clock speeds with high energy efficiency. Credit: Andy Fell/UC Davis

A microchip containing 1,000 independent programmable processors has been designed by a team at the University of California, Davis, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The energy-efficient “KiloCore” chip has a maximum computation rate of 1.78 trillion instructions per second and contains 621 million transistors.

“To the best of our knowledge, it is the world’s first 1,000-processor chip and it is the highest clock-rate processor ever designed in a university,” said Prof. Bevan Baas. While other multiple-processor chips have been created, none exceed about 300 processors...

An example of the microchip filter being used inside Fissell’s artificial kidney. Credit: Vanderbilt University

Nephrologists are making major progress on a first-of-its kind device to free kidney patients from dialysis. He is building an implantable artificial kidney with microchip filters and living kidney cells that will be powered by a patient’s own heart. “We are creating a bio-hybrid device that can mimic a kidney to remove enough waste products, salt and water to keep a patient off dialysis,” said Fissell. Fissell says the goal is to make it small enough, roughly the size of a soda can, to be implanted inside a patient’s body.

“It’s called silicon nanotechnology. It uses the same processes that were developed by the microelectronics industry for computers,” said Fissell...