UCLA Engineering / September 4, 2019 / If you crack open any of the electronic devices you use on a daily basis— your phone, smartwatch, tablet, TV, instant pot or microwave— you’ll see a landscape reminiscent of a miniscule city map. Computer chips, each dotted with microscopic transistors, are arranged like buildings on the green grid of a circuit board. The view you see is roughly how the insides of computers have looked for the past half century. But UCLA researchers at the Center for Heterogeneous Integration and Performance Scaling (CHIPS) say that computers powered on these chips are reaching their limits and a redesign is needed. Their work aims to make the innards of electronics fundamentally different, and will, in turn, allow new generations of flexible, implantable, faster, cheaper, smaller and more powerful systems, they say.
“It will make possible things that weren’t possible before,” said Subramanian Iyer, a UCLA professor of electrical and computer engineering, and director of CHIPS.