Self-Healing Technology Makes Everyday and Lifesaving Devices More Reliable

The area of semiconductor and communication technologies continues to grow rapidly and has enabled electronic devices to impact every aspect of our daily lives. From cell phones and PDAs to more important life saving medical equipment, it's important that the quality and reliability of these applications is ensured. If a cell phone breaks, its user may be temporarily inconvenienced, but the consequences that arise from the failure of an important piece of medical can be devastating.

This exhibit, highlighting reliable and self-healing architectures for electronic devices, takes a look at new research and ways foreseeable errors can be mitigated. Inevitable device defects have given rise to new research, which aims to create reliable systems despite unreliable devices. Self-healing architecture refers to a device’s ability to respond to a system problem and automatically avoid errors through back-up or rerouted systems.

Errors in systems can be caused by many outside influences, including Single Event Upset Susceptibility due to cosmic radiation, electromagnetic interference, as well as life-time degradation effects due to extreme environmental and process variations. New research at RIT’s Semiconductor & Microsystems Fabrication Laboratory seeks to find ways around such system errors so that the catastrophic consequences of certain system failures can eventually become a thing of the past.

This exhibit can be found all day in Engineering Park James E. Gleason Building (9), room 3430. The RIT Semiconductor and Microsystems Fabrication Laboratory is a separate entity within the Kate Gleason College of Engineering, and is responsible for innovative research and hands-on learning techniques.