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The Crazy-Tiny Next Generation of Computers
An anonymous reader writes University of Michigan professors are about to release the design files for a one-cubic-millimeter computer, or mote. They have finally reached a goal set in 1997, when UC Berkeley professor Kristopher Pister coined the term "smart dust" and envisioned computers blanketing the Earth. Such motes are likely to play a key role in the much-ballyhooed Internet of Things. From the article: "When Prabal Dutta accidentally drops a computer, nothing breaks. There’s no crash. The only sound you might hear is a prolonged groan. That’s because these computers are just one cubic millimeter in size, and once they hit the floor, they’re gone. 'We just lose them,' Dutta says. 'It’s worse than jewelry.' To drive the point home, Dutta, an assistant professor of electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, emails me a photo of 50 of these computers. They barely fill a thimble halfway to its brim."
That article is all about the miniaturization process they went through. Wake me up when the hardware specs are available: CPU speed, amount of RAM, wireless connectivity and range, etc.
I have serious doubts that these things will become popular anytime soon (if ever), especially if their per-unit cost is more than a few cents. Their size, coupled with the "if you lose sight of it, consider it lost forever" joke (read: warning), makes them seem impractical.
They should scale it back up to the size of that quarter.
Didn't you see the two golden buttons in the pic? The left is for ones, and the right for zeros. This literally is a computer for ants...
But a bit more to the point, the power issue is explained in TFA. Couldn't see anything on IO, but my first thought was something similar to RFID.