How many time we have thought “it would be nice if I just think of calling my friend and ,voilà, my cell phone dials his number!”. May be not that but something equivalent: turning our thoughts into immediate action with no cumbersome interface.

Samsung is working on BCI to control a cell phone.

Well, progress in BCI, Brain Computer Interface, is now turning the question into “when will it be possible…”. Our wish, indeed, may be granted soon.

On the left a photo of a soft helmet being experimented by Samsung to pick up electrical signals generated by thoughts in our brain and decode them via a computer to generate commands to a cell phone.

Now, it is clear that I do not want to wear such a thing! But researchers are progressing in making such an helmet invisible, by replacing it with a chip that can be implanted under the scalp. That would solve the aesthetics issue but the whole thing is going to open up a can of worm!

Suppose we will come to a point that you can be implanted at very low cost and with no pain nor physical side effects a chip that can pick up your thoughts and send them to a computer (let’s assume the one in your cell phone) and therefore you, or may be not you but many people, will choose to have such an implant.

The possibility to connect at light speed thinking and acting may give a competitive advantage in many field and so one might suppose that over time a growing number of people will make BCI a mainstream reality.

What are the legal implication? This is what an article on Technology Review is wondering about.

Who is going to be accountable if something breaks down and you do not what you though but something different? Or, even more likely, you changed your mind a millisecond after having sent the command…? The delay between thinking and acting is saving our day many times over!

And, of course, this is just the beginning! What if we get hacked? Our thoughts gets stolen, made public?

The fact is we have been evolved through the eons within a very precise framework: the impossibility to know for sure what another person is thinking. And even if we might guess what is going on in another brain we do not know for sure what will be going on in the next second… This impossibility, or uncertainty, has shaped our behaviour and our social relations.

If this framework crumbles we find ourselves completely unprepared in a social sense. And this is the one that is most crucial to our life. Indeed it is ever more true that new solutions beget new problems!

About one year ago I posted the news of a research at the MIT that identifies molybdenum disulphide as a potential new material for manufacturing chips in the future.

a transistor based on molybdenum disulphide

Well, now I see that we have been moving forward. Researchers at the Purdue University have managed to develop a chip based on this material. As stated by the researchers at the MIT the molybdenum disulphide has a band gap that can be exploited to create diodes and transistors. At Purdue they have managed to create layers of this material that can be used to create transistors.

They found out that layers can be as thin as 0.7nm (that is just 3 atoms thick, compare this with graphene that is a single layer one atom thick) but the best performance is achieved in sheets of about 15 layers for a thickness of 8 to 12 nm.

Each layer is formed by two-dimensional nano crystals.

The current technology used to manufacture chips, CMOS – complementary metal oxide semiconductors, is going to reach its manufacturing-economics limits by 2020 at about 6nm scale. Beyond that we need to find alternatives and graphene is considered by many as the next step.

However, in spite of the many research projects being funded, a big one is the European Flagship program on graphene – 1 billion € over the next 10 years, it is likely that industrial availability of a new electronic generation based on graphene won’t be doable before 2025. Hence there is a gap that need to be filled by some intermediate technology and this is what MIT and Purdue hope to create with molybdenum disulphide.

Of course, it may prove a doomed attempt if graphene becomes available by 2020, or if something else comes up.

Silicon has sustained the evolution of electronics for the last 60 years and still has some steam to progress further. However, we are seeing the end of the line so to keep progressing we need to change to a new line. Scientists are betting on carbon, and particularly on graphene. Big projects are being funded to find industrial ways to produce and use graphene but results are probably not becoming available before the end of this decade. That may create a gap between the furthest possible evolution of silicon and the beginning of the graphene area.

Creating Germanane

This is why scientists are looking at other potential ways to substitute the silicon. One key point is to find something that can re-use the industrial processes already in place, something that is not likely to happen with the graphene and that therefore will lead to the need of huge investment in brand new industrial plants.

60 years ago scientists used germanium to create the first transistor. It was a bulky one, in that same volume you would be able to store close to 1 trillion transistors today! It was also expensive and soon after scientists found a way to replace germanium with silicon.

Now they are reconsidering germanium since it has, also from a manufacturing point of view, characteristics that are similar to silicon so that only minor changes to existing production processes would be needed to create a germanium wafer.

A team of researchers at the University of Ohio have just published a paper reporting on their success in creating a single layer of germanium, called germanane, that can be used to replace silicon. It has very interesting characteristics, with a conductivity 10 times better than silicon and 5 times better than the normal germanium.

Credit – http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/nn4009406

To achieve this result they used a compound of germanium and calcium, as shown in the drawing (credit: Elisabeth Bianco et al./ACS Nano), and then removed the calcium atoms by washing them out and substituting them with hydrogen atoms. This creates a multilayered structure that is very strong and not affected by oxidation (as silicon is).

Additionally, the layered germanium, or germanane, has the interesting property of being able to process light. It has what scientists call a direct band gap making it able to absorb and emit light, an ideal property for optoelectronic applications.

In the last decade scientists forecasted that within ten years they would be able to create a bionic eye, that is to implant in an eye that has lost the capability to “see” a chip that can recreate that function. There are many people who have lost their sight, many after having been hit by retinitis pigmentosa, a degeneration of the retina leading to blindness.

Schematics of a retinal implant

Scientists have followed two approaches to restore sight: implanting electrodes on the visual cortex to simulate signals received by the eyes and implanting a chip on the faulty retina to connect directly to the optic nerve. The latter is by far the better approach, but it is also the most difficult one.

It is therefore a great news to see that the FDA has granted the first approval to a chip for implant in the eye, the Argus II.

The chip is part of a system to provide visual stimuli to the optic nerve: a pair of glasses embed a video camera that sends the images being captured to a tiny computer worn by the person. In the future we can expect to have this computer embedded in the glasses (the critical issue here is the size of the battery).

The computer transforms the images into signals that are brought back to the glasses to be transmitted via an antenna to the chip implanted on the retina. The transmission is also providing the power for the chip to capture the signal and relay it to the optic nerve.

The signals are not exactly the same as the ones that a normal functioning retina would provide to the optic nerve but they are close enough to let the plasticity of the brain to interpret them. After a while the brain rewires itself and accepts these signals as the “usual” visual signals recreating the image on the visual cortex.

The images that are perceived are quite a long shot from the images that a normal retina is able to create. Here the person is able to see light in different shades and so become aware if it is dark or not and can recognise forms well enough to find her way in a room without bumping on a chair or a table. There is no way, today, to recognise a face, nor to read a book.

But this is TODAY! The biggest issues have been resolved and now it is a matter of evolving to increase the resolution and the variety of signals. And we know very well that evolution is an intrinsic property of electronics. I am therefore quite confident that by the end of this decade we will be able to implant a chip that would allow a blind person to read a book and to recognise her friends. And this looks more like magic than technology!

The rendering shows the optical communications within a silicon chip.

IBM has announced the discovery of a method to create optical pathways in silicon chip, effectively integrating optical communication in chips to replace electrical communications.

They have been able to assemble at sub 100 nm scale silicon and optical components side by side within the same chip using what is called silicon nano-photonics.

Silicon nano-photonics increases the speed in data exchange within the chip and can extend its communications to other chips on the same board or on different boards, decreasing connectivity cost and energy requirement.

The research was initiated in 2010 and now has reached maturity, letting researchers to create a CMOS based chip that includes WDM components for optical transmission, the same technology used on large capacity optical fibre for long distance communications.

The growing number of enterprises needing to process huge amount of data )as well as institutions) and to correlate data form different sources (Big Data) is a perfect match to this technology that will provide enormous capabilities to handle data within a chip and across chips distributed all over a network. As a matter of fact processing of data may take place seamlessly within the chip with different parts connected through optical communications or distributed over many chips potentially distributed and connected through an optical network.
This, really, is the future Cloud, at the level of the chip and providing capacity by connecting chips.

Chips production has entered the nano scale several years ago, we are now approaching the 14 nanometer scale and by 2017 we should reach the 10 nanometer thresholds. This is pretty close to the atom dimension (just 100 times bigger …) and there are big hurdles to be overcome to move forwards. And some of them are not scientific nor technologic hurdle but economic stonewalls. Building a chip production plant at 14 nanometer scale requires some 10 billion $!

However, in spite of the nano-dimension, we are not using nano tech paradigm in chip building. We are still etching (with more and more sophisticated means) the silicon wafer (300 mm and now moving up to 450 mm diameter disc).

Schematics of nanowire aggregation to form an electronic circuit

Now a new approach invented by researchers at the Lund University in Sweden may change all of this and shift chips manufacturing into the nano era.

Rather than starting with a substrate (the silicon wafer) and etching it to create the desired transistors and circuits the researchers have chosen to use nanoparticles of gold floating in a stream of gas that are used as atomic substrate to grow the transistors and then to aggregate them one another to form circuits.

Researchers have managed to create a brand new process of self construction, driven and controlled through variation of temperature of the gas and stimulated by different sizes of the gold particles. The new technology has been called ”aerotaxy”  (because the aggregation is made in the airflow).

For a detailed explanation read their paper and enter the code: “I 10.1038/nature11652”.

The researchers expect to see this new approach to reach an industrial maturity within 2 to 4 years, so we might expect to see nano produced chips in the second half of this decade. They promise to be smaller, cheaper and faster pushing the envelope a little bit further down the lane.

The electronic circuit printed using nano particles

Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have  found a way to use nano-particles of cadmium selenide to print electronic circuits on a plastic substrata.

Flexible circuits are very interesting since they can be used in a variety of applications and several solutions have been found.

They all share the characteristics of being possible through a process of deposition at ambient temperature (or not too different from that) since the plastic substrate used would melt at high temperature, like the ones used to create a silicon wafer.

The interest in the discovery of this group of researchers at Penn is that the resulting circuits have a performance 20 times better than an equivalent circuit based on silicon.

Now, we don’t need to be overexcited. The silicon production has achieved a tremendous degree of effectiveness, quality and performance and it will take several years to have an alternative production method.

Having said that, however, we can see that for a number of applications there is the need for a flexible chip and as these applications will become reality we will see this technology grow in volume and hence become more effective in terms of production processes. This is all what it takes to start a positive innovation spiral that eventually may lead to the dismissal of silicon. This latter, however, is not on the horizon!

You may not know, I didn’t, but there is a power plant generating electrons inside our ears, like a battery that is used by mammalians to power the aural communications to the brain.

MTL chip implanted in the ear drum of guinea pigs

It turns out that this battery is over dimensioned and the researchers have started to think about using this “extra” energy for powering an implanted chip.

Researchers at the MIT have done just that: created a low power chip and implanted it into the ear drum of guinea pigs and demonstrated that it does not impair the hearing and can harvest sufficient energy to power the chip and support a wireless communication to a nearby device.

The chip has been created by the Microsystems Technology Laboratory -MTL- del MIT to monitor ear activity in persons with hearing impairment and their reaction to therapy. In perspectives the chip should be able to deliver drugs, “just in time”.

Physiologists have known since the 1950′s of the existence of this biological battery but there was the concern that tapping onto this battery would have impaired the hearing.

The progress in electronics, both in terms of miniaturisation (so that the chip does not interfere with the inner ear working) and in terms of power requirements (so that only a trifle of energy is actually diverted from the biological battery from its natural usage), has made such implant possible.

Actually, a very sophisticated energy management has been implemented because the available power is really tiny and would not allow a continuous wireless communications. The chip harvests energy for about 40 seconds (or even longer, a few minutes if needed) and then switches on the radio channel to communicate to a collecting device that may be in the person’s pocket. It is this latter that can take care of the communications with the Internet.

In this decade we are going to see more and more implants and this will not just help medicine as it is practiced today but will also transform medicine int a personalised protocol that in turns changes the value chain and the rules of the game in the health care.

Our age is often called the one of silicon, since so much in our life depends on microprocessors and they are made of silicon. The evolution in the processes of microchip production has led to the tremendous advances in technology and to the Society we are today. The Information Society is enabled by silicon and the market speed by the fast evolution pace of silicon chips (Moore’s law).

Schematics of a carbon nanotube on a Hafnium bi-oxide substrata

However, we are approaching a point where further evolution based on silicon will become more and more difficult. That is why researchers are looking at other substances and here carbon is the most natural pretender.

Carbon comes in many forms, from glittering diamonds to soft lead in a pencil. To replace the silicon in a chip scientists are looking at carbon nanotubes, structure composed by 80 atoms of carbons forming a tiny tube that has the required property to manufacture transistors.

Although single transistors have been made using nanotube, the challenge lies in creating a chip with million. billions of them. This requires a manufacturing process that is cheap, fast and accurate. As accurate in fact to allow the placement of a single nanotube with a tolerance of about 2 atoms!

This is what IBM scientists have managed to do, not up to a billion but so far for tens of thousands of nanotubes, and it is clearly a significant progress from the stage of controlling just a few of them.

The nanotubes are created in an industrial process and are then placed in a solution that is sprayed on a substrata made by hafnium bi-oxide. The correct placement of them allows the creation of the chip with the desired properties.

The distance from a few tens of thousands to a billion is huge but … it is as big as moving from a few units to tens of thousands!

We can say they are half way to the target!

Cockroach with the chip glued to its back and connections to antennae and cerci

Researchers at the NC University have perfected a system for controlling cockroaches via electric impulses.

As you can see in the photo, a tiny chip converts signals received by a remote radio controller into impulses to the antennae and to the cerci (the back sensory system of a roach detecting air movement, possibly due to some predators getting closer).

The signalling is pretty straightforward. A stimulation of the cerci makes the roach move forward, a stimulation on the right antenna makes it go left and conversely go right when the left antenna is stimulated.

The goal is to be able to guide a roach, equipped with micro cameras, under a collapsed building to look for survivors.

You can take a look at the paper presented at the IEEE conference “Engineering in Medicine and Biology” held at the end of August in Sand Diego, CA,and at the clip to see the bioRobot in action:

When I said, at the beginning of this post, “have perfected” I was referring to the fact that research on controlling roaches through electronics initiated over 10 years ago at the Tokyo university. Interesting to see how 10 years makes a difference in the size of the electronics required.

You may want to go back in time and read the article presenting that research.

As you can see in the photo, the controller was receiving signals via infrared communications, whilst the one used by NC researchers uses radio communications.