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World's Smallest Computer Could Someday Go Inside Biological Cells

University of Michigan engineers Dennis Sylvester and David Blaauw have developed millimeter-sized computing units capable of harvesting solar power to utilize wireless communication, pressure and temperature sensors, as well as image and video processing. Each unit is assembled in layers and is capable of being customized to a particular function. While testing has been developed to place these units on top of tumors inside cancer patients to determine the results of chemotherapy, the range of applications seem unlimited. Future development of the technology is going to break down the size constriction even smaller. At a third of a millimeter, the researchers hope that these micro computers would be able to be placed inside biological cells to monitor and broadcast cellular activity.

Topics:
Computers Data Acquisition Data Acquisition Diagnostics Electronics & Computers Energy Energy Harvesting Internet of Things Medical Monitoring Power RF & Microwave Electronics Semiconductors & ICs Sensors Solar Power Test & Measurement

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    Transcript

    00:00:00 when most people think about computers they think about their desktop or maybe even their smartphone the physical size of computing technology continues to shrink and engineers at the University of Michigan have actually developed computers on a millimeter scale so how will these tiny computers influence our digital Destiny we are here with Dennis

    00:00:20 Sylvester at U ofm fish the largest and busiest of the campus Computing sites all right well thanks for meeting me here sure are the computers that your team is developing at Michigan actually the world's smallest computers uh we believe so uh We've not seen anything remotely close to that really reported cubic centimeter scale has been reported um we're looking at cubic millimeter

    00:00:43 scale which is uh 10 cubed or 1,000 times smaller than that computers are really just a set of capabilities or features memory or storage input output capabilities and uh our systems have these same capabilities as these larger systems maybe not as high performance is those systems but obviously with other benefits like their size their power consumption Etc what are the

    00:01:06 capabilities of your computers well they have wireless communication capability of course computation and data storage and they also have a number of sensing modalities they can sense pressure they can sense temperature and actually we even have an imager on the system so we can take U uh pictures or video or or do motion detection we're working on systems where you implant these into the

    00:01:25 body for instance into tumors to measure pressure inside the tumor because that's a really good indicator of whether chemotherapy is working early on we're looking at other environmental sensing applications surveillance because of the Imaging capabilities the types of things that you could use this for a lot of people like myself haven't even imagined yet so we actually designed the chips

    00:01:45 here with our students when we handle them in the lab we indeed use little tweezers we actually have different layers that we stack on top of each other and each layer is a little chip that has a particular function so one layer for instance is the radio another layer is the microprocessor and then we have another layer it's the battery occasionally we drop one and uh it's

    00:02:04 true that occasionally we lose one the way we actually run these is all through light there's a little solar harvesting module on top of it uh that will charge the battery then the whole system will reset and boot uh and then we can actually program it by flashing light at it uh with a certain pattern uh as a way to communicate to it and then once that's done then the radio fires up and

    00:02:26 we can start talking to it we are working on even smaller versions of this that would be maybe on the order of a fraction of a millimeter maybe a third of a millimeter in in size and ultimately we'd like to make them small enough that we can place them in cells biological cells so we can actually start measuring things inside while the cell is doing its you know biochemical

    00:02:49 uh processing as Michigan Engineers continue to miniaturize Computing technology the implications of how they might be used and help us understand the world in which we live seem huge the data is messy I mean that there are missing data there's corrupted data the sensors are biased they lose their calibration the government universities companies are collecting data and

    00:03:12 they're just storing it