Carnegie Mellon University has been awarded a six-year, $4.2 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to create chip architectures smart enough to reconfigure and fix themselves. The chips are being designed to support higher performance at lower cost. They’re also being designed to provide an alternative to the constant shrinking of components to pack more power onto chips.
“In the future it is possible to imagine producing economical integrated circuits for applications that demand relatively low volumes of integrated circuits,” said Ed Schlesinger, center director and head of Carnegie Mellon’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department.
Separately, MIT researchers are building a portable “lab on a chip” that could be used to test soldiers on the field of battle for exposure to biological or chemical weapons. The tiny battery-powered diagnostic device would be able to perform hundreds of chemical experiments, actually pumping blood and other fluids needing testing. Previous approaches have proven bulky and required too much electricity.
Earlier this month, the University of Central Florida said researchers there and at a U.K.-based company called Powerlase are working to establish extreme ultraviolet light as a power source for making chips. Martin Richardson, the school’s Northrop Grumman professor of X-ray optics, has demonstrated this sort of light with 30 times the power of previous attempts. Chips are now made using longer-wavelength ultraviolet light.
