Microchip

Ordinarily, the microcircuit patterns used in microchips are printed onto flat silicon wafers, potentially limiting their applications. A new technique lets such patterns be more easily applied to curved surfaces – and it uses "candy" to do the job.

A team of engineers has given microchips a new ability – the power of flight. Inspired by wind-dispersed seeds, these “microfliers” are shaped like tiny propellers to catch the wind, and may be the smallest flying structures ever made by humans.

By making alterations to the underlying structure of the wonder material graphene, scientists at the University of Sussex have extended its capabilities even further to create the tiniest microchips yet.

​​​​​​MIT’s ongoing efforts to make flying drones ever smaller has passed a new milestone with the latest version of its Navion navigation chip. Essentially the brains for a drone the size of a honeybee, the chip measures is about the size of a Lego minifigure’s footprint.

​​For years a subset of the transhumanist community, called “grinders”, has been experimenting with implanting electronics and microchips into their bodies. Now a tech company based in Wisconsin is set to offer all its employees the option of having a microchip implanted in their hands.​

​MIT researchers have developed a new way to make smaller circuits that would allow more of them to be crammed onto microchips. The new technique could make patterns smaller than 10 nm by combining several processes already used, which means they could be implemented relatively easily and cheaply.

Researchers at the University of Sussex claim to have produced a method that removes lasers from quantum logic gates, thereby removing one of the largest stumbling blocks to producing a workable, full-sized quantum computer system

Yale scientists have created a method to significantly increase the power of laser light on a silicon chip by boosting it with sound waves. This new device promises more efficient fiber-optic communications and better data signal processing

As part of DARPA's ICECool-Applications research program, Lockheed Martin is developing a way of cooling high-powered microchips from the inside using microscopic drops of water.​

A promising new treatment for epilepsy directly targets the nerve cells that cause seizures. Its creators hope to combine it with an implantable microchip that they previously developed to create an autonomous treatment that delivers epilepsy drugs directly to the brain right before a seizure.

It is possible that self-sufficient, self-sustaining machines could change to suit their environment or even reconfigure broken or damaged pathways to repair themselves if research from École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne into reconfigurable ferroelectric materials comes to fruition.

A new micro-ring resonator has been developed that is claimed to produce copious numbers of entangled photons using miniscule amounts of energy and can fit onto an ordinary silicon chip. This advance promises to bring quantum computing, communication, and cryptography closer to a practical reality.