- Joined
- Dec 3, 2017
- Messages
- 26,290
- Reaction score
- 16,771
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Progressive
Chip upgrade helps miniature drones navigate | MIT News
Low-power design will allow devices as small as a honeybee to determine their location while flying.
Researchers at MIT, who last year designed a tiny computer chip tailored to help honeybee-sized drones navigate, have now shrunk their chip design even further, in both size and power consumption.
The team, co-led by Vivienne Sze, associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, built a fully customized chip from the ground up, with a focus on reducing power consumption and size while also increasing processing speed.
The new computer chip, named “Navion,” which they are presenting this week at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, is just 20 square millimeters — about the size of a LEGO minifigure’s footprint — and consumes just 24 milliwatts of power, or about 1 one-thousandth the energy required to power a lightbulb.
===========================================
Drones the size if a half-dollar coin & even smaller - the size of a honeybee. More incredible stuff from MIT.
One of the entrance requirements at MIT is that you have to write a computer program from scratch. I once write a program for tracking amateur radio communications satellites for the HP-97 printing calculator & it took me at least a hundred hours to debug it.
Low-power design will allow devices as small as a honeybee to determine their location while flying.
Researchers at MIT, who last year designed a tiny computer chip tailored to help honeybee-sized drones navigate, have now shrunk their chip design even further, in both size and power consumption.
The team, co-led by Vivienne Sze, associate professor in MIT's Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS), and Sertac Karaman, the Class of 1948 Career Development Associate Professor of Aeronautics and Astronautics, built a fully customized chip from the ground up, with a focus on reducing power consumption and size while also increasing processing speed.
The new computer chip, named “Navion,” which they are presenting this week at the Symposia on VLSI Technology and Circuits, is just 20 square millimeters — about the size of a LEGO minifigure’s footprint — and consumes just 24 milliwatts of power, or about 1 one-thousandth the energy required to power a lightbulb.
===========================================
Drones the size if a half-dollar coin & even smaller - the size of a honeybee. More incredible stuff from MIT.
One of the entrance requirements at MIT is that you have to write a computer program from scratch. I once write a program for tracking amateur radio communications satellites for the HP-97 printing calculator & it took me at least a hundred hours to debug it.
