chips

According to Kwabena Boahen, a computer scientist at Stanford University, a robot with a processor as smart as the human brain would require at least 10 megawatts to operate. That's the amount of energy produced by a small hydroelectric plant. But a small group of computer scientists may have hit on a new neural supercomputer that could someday emulate the human brain's low energy requirements of just 20 watts--barely enough to run a dim light bulb.

Thanks to a new approach to one of microfluidics' biggest challenges -- how do you propel fluid in a number of directions simultaneously without the clutter of myriad electromechanical valves and pumps? -- we could be closer to seeing our smartphones double as home flu kits. Credit goes to a team of chemical engineers at the University of Michigan for coming up with the innovative system, which uses music to control the fluid.

NEC and Rohm are going back and forth on new engineering breakthroughs that will allow integrated circuits inside chips to consume no power when they're briefly inactive between cycles. And unlike most chip-level developments on the edge, we may see the technology in consumer products by the end of the year.

Imagine an encrypted data chip so secure that even the greatest hackers in history would find impossible to crack. That chip is very much a reality thanks to the combined efforts of Siemens, Austrian Research Centers (ARC) and Graz University of Technology who have teamed up to create the first quantum cryptology chip for commercial use to ensure securer electronic communication.