Topic Name: New radio chip mimics human ear, could enable
universal radio Location: Cambridge, United States MIT engineers
have built a fast, ultra-broadband, low-power radio chip,
modeled on the human inner ear, that could enable wireless
devices capable of receiving cell phone, Internet, radio and
television signals. Rahul Sarpeshkar, associate professor of
electrical engineering and computer science, and his graduate
student, Soumyajit Mandal, designed the chip to mimic the inner
ear, or cochlea. The chip is faster than any human-designed
radio-frequency spectrum analyzer and also operates at much
lower power. "The cochlea quickly gets the big picture of what's
going on in the sound spectrum," said Sarpeshkar. "The more I
started to look at the ear, the more I realized it's like a
super radio with 3,500 parallel channels." Sarpeshkar and his
students describe their new chip, which they have dubbed the
"radio frequency (RF) cochlea," in a paper to be published in
the June issue of the IEEE Journal of Solid-