Electronic chips could be greatly simplified by exploiting the "edge of chaos," which allows long metal wires to amplify signals and act as superconductors, reducing the need for separate amplifiers and lowering power consumption, a new study suggests.

01 Revolutionizing chip design using edge of chaos technolog02 y

When you stub your toe, pain signals are immediately transmitted to the brain through meters of axons made of highly resistive, fleshy material. These axons use a principle called the "edge of chaos," or semistability, to transmit information quickly and accurately.

This study demonstrated the role of the edge of chaos in artificial systems by conducting an electric current through an inorganic material. Normally, the edge of chaos amplifies noise. Surprisingly, however, metal wires placed on top of the edge of chaos material not only conducted the useful signal, but also amplified it. This approach effectively offset the metal resistance losses that normally degrade signal integrity.

Modern electronic chips are made up of numerous components and a large number of metal wires, called interconnects. These metal wires cause severe resistance signal losses, which seriously consume the chip's power. The traditional solution is to split these wires into shorter segments and add transistors to boost and relay weakened signals.

This innovative approach eliminates the need for transistor amplifiers, allowing long metal wires to not only achieve zero resistance like superconductors, but also boost small signals. This advance could radically simplify chip design and greatly improve efficiency.

A metal wire on a medium biased at the edge of chaos can provide an effective negative resistance to a time-varying signal, outputting a larger signal than the input. The amplified energy comes from the static bias applied to the medium. Image credit: Brown, TD, et al. (reMIND), Axon-like active signal transmission. Nature (2024).

02 Advancing signal transmission in electronic products

Electrical signals transmitted through metal conductors lose strength due to the metal's inherent resistance. To compensate, conventional methods require repeatedly interrupting the conductor to insert an amplifier that regenerates the signal. This technique, used for more than a century, limits the design and performance of modern densely interconnected chips. In contrast, this study introduces a new approach based on exploiting the edge of semistable chaos (EOC), a mechanism that scientists have theorized but never demonstrated before. The mechanism supports active signal transmission similar to the self-amplification seen in biological axons.

03 Harnessing the semi-stable edge of chaos to achieve efficient electronic devices

By electrically contacting spin crossovers in lanthanum cobalt oxide (LaCoO 3 ), the researchers isolated a semistable EOC and induced negative resistance and signal amplification in a metal transmission line without the need for a separate amplifier and at normal temperature and pressure. Operando heat maps showed that the energy used to maintain the EOC was not completely lost as heat, but was partially redirected to amplify the signal, enabling sustained active transmission and potentially revolutionizing chip design and performance.

Reference link https://scitechdaily.com/next-gen-electronics-breakthrough-harnessing-the-edge-of-chaos-for-high-performance-efficient-microchips/

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