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Industry News
CORNELL UNIVERSITY
BUILDS MICROWAVE
BRAIN ON A CHIP
Researchers at Cornell University have developed a by-step instructions that are timed by a clock, this
low-power microwave chip, termed a ‘microwave network uses analogue, non-linear behaviour in the
brain’, which is the first processor to compute microwave regime, allowing it to handle data streams
on both ultrafast data signals and wireless in the tens of gigahertz, way beyond the capability of
communication signals by harnessing the power of conventional digital chips.
microwaves.
Applications include identifying bit sequences and
The processor is the first true microwave neural counting binary values in high-speed data, and
network and is fully integrated on a silicon microchip. in testing it achieved over 88 per cent accuracy in
It can perform real-time frequency domain multiple classification tasks that involved wireless
computation for tasks such as radio signal decoding, signal types. This is comparable to digital neural
radar target tracking and digital data processing networks, but the power consumption and size were
using under 200 milliwatts of power. much lower. The chip’s high sensitivity to inputs
also makes it well-suited to hardware security
It deploys interconnected modes produced in
applications such as sensing anomalies in wireless
tuneable waveguides allowing it to recognise patterns
communications across multiple bands of microwave
and learn from data, but unlike traditional neural
frequencies.
networks that rely on digital operations and step-
Doctoral student Bal Govind states:
“Because it’s able to distort in a programmable
way across a wide band of frequencies
instantaneously, it can be repurposed for several
computing tasks. It by-passes a number of signal
processing steps that digital computers normally
have to do.
In traditional digital systems, as tasks get more
complex, you need more circuitry, more power
and more error correction to maintain accuracy.
But with our probabilistic approach, we’re able
to maintain high accuracy on both simple and
complex computations without that added
overhead”.
Reference: ‘Researchers build “Microwave Brain” on a chip’, New
Electronics, Vol.58, Issue 8, September 2025, p.53
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