Radio chip inspired by human ear
MIT researchers built a radio chip inspired by the inner ear. The "RF cochlea chip" could be a key component in a "cognitive radio," a device that can determine the appropriate frequency and power consumption required and adjust itself accordingly. Such a universal radio architecture could efficiently handle a wide range of signals, from cellular to WiFi to television. From MIT News:
Drawing inspiration from nature to build a better radioThe RF cochlea mimics the structure and function of the biological cochlea, which uses fluid mechanics, piezoelectrics and neural signal processing to convert sound waves into electrical signals that are sent to the brain.
As sound waves enter the cochlea, they create mechanical waves in the cochlear membrane and the fluid of the inner ear, activating hair cells (cells that cause electrical signals to be sent to the brain). The cochlea can perceive a 100-fold range of frequencies -- in humans, from 100 to 10,000 Hz. Sarpeshkar used the same design principles in the RF cochlea to create a device that can perceive signals at million-fold higher frequencies, which includes radio signals for most commercial wireless applications...
The RF cochlea, embedded on a silicon chip measuring 1.5 mm by 3 mm, works as an analog spectrum analyzer, detecting the composition of any electromagnetic waves within its perception range. Electromagnetic waves travel through electronic inductors and capacitors (analogous to the biological cochlea's fluid and membrane). Electronic transistors play the role of the cochlea's hair cells.
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100Hz to 10kHz?
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2003/ChrisDAmbrose.shtml
silly MIT
yeah, that caught my eye as well... human hearing is capable of 20Hz to 20kHz range, but I honestly don't know if that's all captured by the cochlea or if there are other organs involved in detecting the lower and higher frequency ranges.
"'Somebody who works in radio would never think of this, and somebody who works in hearing would never think of it, but when you put the two together, each one provides insight into the other,' he says."
When I was a kid, I subscribed to "Ranger Rick" nature magazine. A regular feature was "Nature Did It First" -- sonar, chemoreception, etc.
This sort of inspiration should no longer be a surprise and should be a standard course or seminar for engineers, from "what have we learned" to "what more is there to learn" and "methods of learning" from nature.
do I understand this correctly? The operant word is "parallel"?
Yeah yeah, all very fascinating. Cut to the chase: can I get superhuman hearing with bionic ear implants?
No no, this is just a fancy radio. Probably does VHF to UHF gauging by the log periodic antenna. The innovation is that it isn't a spectrum analyzer which sweeps a tuner across the radio frequencies, it appears to do it all in parallel using a custom MEMS chip.
@5: Sure, if you want to hear the Wi-Fi, cellular, and satellite transmissions, all at the same time, 24/7, for the rest of your life. Oh, and because the brain doesn't hear above ~20 kHz, presumably all that wideband stuff will be mixed into the regular hearing range, so conversation will be thoroughly impossible unless it's in QPSK or 16-QAM.
This is a pretty interesting development. Cognitive radio proponents have been confounded, for years, trying to figure out how to do dynamic spectrum sensing quickly, on the cheap, and at low power.
How much time until this get into my computer?
OMG, you mean with one of these I could hear cellphone, tv, radio, modems, friends, coffee maker, alarm, monitor, headphone, gadgets, scanner, footsteps, beamers, snapshots, speakers, teachers, rivers, oceans, camels, digital divides, black, white, static, Bloomberg, Kindall, mariah, metro announcements, banks, landline, boats, trains, jets, america, ussr, iraq radio, pork, spam, spime, smelliness, myself, unmetriced sounds, pin drops, gum drops, candy, candies, stuff i want, talking, strangers talking, stars, moles, gluons, quarks, bosons, baryons, internet, flat planes, moles, dogs, gods, rain, farts, traffic, patterns, mathematics, total complexity, main states, substates, straylights, doctors, lawyers, judges, presidents, change dropping, poor dogs, rich dogs, mutilated mutated missing dogs, hypofelinephishtail, fairies, centaurs, fauns, gargoyles, aliens, bycycles, sneakers, symphonies, snow, hurricaine fellows, and water boiling all at once? This thing must cost about $100.
Sold! I'm also going to get ocular implants so I can see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
the human/machine interface is the breakthrough we are waiting for. No matter how much better the sensors get, without that it's nothing. And then I'll grab the new frequency advertising rights.
I'm also going to get ocular implants so I can see the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Just put a hairband over your eyes.
This might be useful as a spectrum analyzer (as they claim), but I am dubious about its ability to actually decode any of the signals.
The general focus these days is to get as much data in as narrow a spectrum as possible. This thing appears to gather as much bandwidth as possible -- quite the opposite of what is needed.
What happens if this thing needs to gather a 2 MHz signal to decode it, but the desired frequencies overlap two or more of the "cochlea hairs" inside this thing? Trying to reconstruct the original signal from that data would be difficult if not impossible.
Still, a pretty cool concepts though.
I wonder why we can't hear above 20khz anyways. Dog can, seems humans are in some kind of spectrum minority.
Is frequency a product of brain 'speed' ?? Do the tops of the food chains normally have bad hearing, because we've got no real predators to listen for ?
Have frequency abilities changed much for us over the years? Maybe once we had great hearing, then we domesticated dogs and put them on guard duty, we didn't need to hear so well after that. ??
@ #15 I guess it's because we don't need to hear and catch small rodents to survive.
We also listen to loud crap on our iPods which robs us of the 15K-22K range after a couple of years.
This may not be something you'd want implanted in your cranium or even in a device stuck in your ear, but it would be a great component for a tricorder.
And then, you know, you get to look at the display and say things like, "Captain, I'm detecting a type of energy I've never encountered before."