Chip self-repair! US team develops self-repair system

There are as many as hundreds of millions of transistors in the tiny CPU chip, and the complexity of the circuit can be imagined. If the chip is one of the circuits, the entire CPU will be scrapped. However, if the chip has self-repair capability, it is like a science fiction movie. In Terminator's T-1000 robot, the situation is different. Recently, a research team in the United States has developed a special self-healing chip system that can self-repair in the circuit, thus avoiding the retirement of the entire CPU.

The self-healing chip system was developed by a research team at the University of Illinois in the United States, and led by aviation engineers Scott White and Nancy Sottos. Due to the particularity of the aerospace field, replacement of necrotic chips is very difficult, so the development of self-healing chips is necessary.

Jeffrey Moore, a chemical engineer at the research team, claimed that the self-healing chip made the system simple, and that rebuilding or rechanging the chip was not as easy as repairing itself. The special materials used by the self-healing chip can solve some problems on its own, and it is much faster than no human intervention.

The research on self-healing chips was carried out by IBM in 2004. At that time, IBM's chip self-healing technology was named eFuse. This technology enables the chip to monitor, adjust and repair itself. The principle of eFuse technology is to add a large number of micro-dissolving wires on each chip at the beginning of design. Micro-Electrolysis can change the voltage of the circuit or increase and decrease the speed to meet the needs of the task.

With the development of electronic devices, small chips have integrated hundreds of millions of transistors. The complexity and density of integrated circuits make it difficult to carry out manual maintenance. This is often a tiny circuit flaw, and it will cause the entire CPU to lose its function and hundreds of millions of transistors will be scrapped. And because of the importance of chips in electronic devices, a small problem can cause the entire device, such as personal computers and servers, to suffer huge losses and even downtime.