A computer chip made of glass and silicon with channels that hold liquids
Hui Lab at the University of California, Irvine
A pneumatic computer made of glass and silicon uses pressure instead of electricity to encode data. This allows chip-sized devices to perform procedures normally performed by lab technicians.
Lab-on-a-chip devices have been pursued for decades as a smaller, cheaper, and portable alternative to performing routine biochemistry manually using clunky glassware. Some biochemical experiments, such as cell culture and small organ growth, are being miniaturized, but most of these devices require far more equipment than just a chip.
“If you hold a chip in your hand, everything happens on that chip, but if you zoom out, you’ll see a refrigerator-sized box controlling it. It’s actually a lab-on-a-chip.” No,” says Elliott Hoy of the University of California, Irvine. He and his colleagues set out to replace the giant box with tiny computers that didn’t require electricity and fit inside each lab-on-a-chip.
They sandwiched a 0.25 millimeter thick silicon sheet between two thin glass plates. They etched tiny grooves in the glass through which liquids needed for chemical reactions could flow, and drilled tiny holes in the silicon layer so that he could connect the grooves between the two sheets of glass.
It mimics how pressure differences cause liquids to pass through channels, and voltage changes cause electricity to flow. Via wires inside an electronic computer chip. They specified low vacuum pressure as “1” and atmospheric pressure as “0”, and added a small valve that could exchange the two values. This turned the chip into a pneumatic computer.
To code the program, they used various silicon sheets as “punch cards” and found an easy way to change the pressure to enter the data. I put my finger on the designated point.
The most complex chip the team built held four bits of information and performed a procedure called serial dilution that determined the concentration of dissolved chemicals in liquids. Normally, researchers would repeatedly pipette liquid from one glass cylinder to another. Hui added that pneumatic computer chips, so-called microfluidic devices, that we already use, such as Covid-19 tests at home, could be used to detect just whether the virus is present or not. He said that it is possible to determine the concentration of
William Glover of the University of California, Riverside, said automating chips without off-chip electronics would be very useful. “This approach can reduce the cost of some microfluidic devices by 99 percent, making them smaller and easier to build,” he says.
If computing power advances enough, the technology could serve as an off-the-shelf biomedical product for experiments with many inputs, such as growing tissue on a chip, says Albert Folch of the University of Washington in Seattle. says Mr. He said valves in pneumatic computers can’t yet do everything that transistors in electronic chips do, but pneumatic computers’ computing power may improve in the future.
Siavash Aral of California State University, Long Beach, who worked on the project, said pneumatic computers could control small biochemistry labs, but could also be the “brains” of soft robots. Air and pressure are already used to move some robots, and in the future they could also be used to make decisions through simple math, he said.
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