Speaker A
[Music] Thank you for choosing a profession. Choosing our specialty sometimes is challenging to some of us; for others, it's well known in advance. In my case, I knew from my childhood that I had to be in science and technology. I was
Yervant Zorian explores microchip health, self-repair, and resilience, drawing parallels to human health and emphasizing adaptability and security.
Key Takeaways
- Microchips require built-in intelligence for self-testing, diagnosis, and repair due to inevitable manufacturing defects.
- Health maintenance of chips is continuous and critical, especially for mission-critical applications.
- Security and safety must be integrated into chip design to protect against attacks and environmental factors.
- Reconfigurability and adaptability are essential for chips to respond to new challenges over their lifecycle.
- The resilience and self-healing of chips offer valuable lessons for human health and societal well-being.
What the video covers
- Yervant Zorian shares his journey choosing science and technology, focusing on electronic systems' health, particularly microchips.
- Microchips are the 'brains' of electronic devices, containing billions of transistors that must function flawlessly despite manufacturing defects.
- He developed autonomous self-testing and self-repair mechanisms inside chips to ensure reliability and longevity.
- Chips now perform continuous health maintenance, including periodic self-checks and repairs, especially in mission-critical applications like cars.
- Safety and security have become essential design aspects to protect chips from environmental changes and cyber-attacks.
- Chips are designed to be reconfigurable and reprogrammable to adapt to new defects, viruses, and evolving threats.
- The self-healing and resilience mechanisms in chips mimic biological processes in the human body.
- Zorian emphasizes the importance of resilience and adaptability in both technology and human life, especially during challenges.
- He advocates for collaboration and ecosystem-building to enhance resilience and performance in individuals and societies.
- The talk concludes with a hopeful message about learning from microchips to improve human health, happiness, and societal strength.
Chapters
- 00:00Choosing a Profession and Early Inspirations
- 00:51Choosing Electronic Systems and Microchips
- 01:24Microchips as the Brains of Electronic Systems
- 01:52Complexity and Manufacturing Challenges of Chips
- 03:08Development of Self-Testing and Self-Repair in Chips
- 04:16Continuous Health Maintenance and Aging Effects
- 05:27Importance of Safety and Security in Chip Design
- 06:35Reconfigurability and Adaptability for New Challenges
- 07:11Parallels Between Chip Resilience and Human Health
- 08:20Final Thoughts on Resilience and Collaboration
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
Speaker A
surrounded by, I was raised in an engineering family, scientific books, equipment, experiments, summer training when I was a teenager. But I didn't know what was the specialty to follow as I grew up, to reach my innovative years, to do my
Speaker A
research in graduate study. I had to choose a field. At that time, my special friend, now my lovely wife, chose to go to the health domain, to the health profession. But the human health, for me, that was too
Speaker A
complicated. That was vague, too much to understand. So what I chose to do is to work in the electronic systems, but the health of electronic systems. Electronic systems, which used to be less complex, now day by day they became much
Speaker A
more complex, much more useful to all of us in our lives. But we had to maintain their health, and I particularly chose to work on the brains of the electronic system. And what are the brains? They are the microchips.
Speaker A
You know, the brain of your PC, the brain of your smart equipment in your pocket, the brain of the self-driving car, or the brain of your TV or your kitchen equipment. All the chips, and those chips carry lots of
Speaker A
intelligence. They're very similar to our brain, not as complex, not as capable, but they have storage, they have processing power, they have memory, they have processing engines. They work together to keep the history and to make judgments. But those brains
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are not perfect. Like any other thing that we manufacture, we manufacture them with defects sometimes. Even though today the chips are quite complex, they go through 300 stages in manufacturing, chemical, physical stages until a chip is made. But those stages have impurities, have
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imperfections. The first chip was a single transistor. You know, back at the time, shortly, I thought that there may be some chips with few transistors. When I started my profession, we had thousand transistors. Today, the largest chip that I know of has
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57 billion transistors. Billion, and that's not a small population to make sure that every single transistor is doing its function at the right speed, interacting with its neighbors the right way is a challenge. That's why maintaining the health of
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those chips is not easy. When I started, the need was to test them to make sure that every single one of them is working fine. But like any other Armenian, I thought that we have to depend less on the outside,
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rely on ourselves. So I created autonomous testing, self-testing engines inside the chips to make the chip, besides its function, to test itself. It was okay at the beginning. Few years later, I was in bed labs. The chips became more complex. Testing was
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not enough. We had to do self-diagnosis. That was not enough. Few years later, we had to do self-repair. So we created chips that repair themselves, and today they are common. Today, almost every chip repairs itself. Why? Because
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with so many transistors, it's guaranteed to have few defects, and you cannot accept the chip with defect, especially if it's in critical missions. Even though we spend lots of effort, lots of money to manufacture those chips, it takes about 20 billion dollars to make
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one factory to make chips of today, three nanometer chips. But still, the imperfections are there. That's why we created that intelligence that sits in the chip in different corners of the chip and helps repair itself. Repair was not enough
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because those chips were started to be used in various mission-critical places, and we noticed that during the life cycle of the chip, the next three years, five years, 15 years, if it's a car, you need to be able to maintain the
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health throughout, and there are aging effects, there are degradations that would happen. Even the transistors degrade themselves. They perform less, they perform slower, they do mistakes. So you need to maintain that self-repair continuously. So today, the chips have to do periodic
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checking, periodic fixing. In the cars, every 100 milliseconds a chip has to test itself, and every time you power it on, it has to repair itself. Okay, so these are facts. That's all there. We now need to add more into the safety
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aspect. Safety is where mistakes happen, either we as users or our surroundings or environmental. In fact, they would change things. So therefore, safety is an important element. Security is also very important. In the past 10 years, we saw that intruders
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attacks not only on software but also on the chips. So we need to protect the chip from attacks as well. So all of that has to go in the design. So as the chips are being designed, as we design or provide
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solutions to design chips, we need to put all these things in them. So besides doing its own functionality, whatever it is, it has also to maintain its health. So health maintenance throughout the life cycle became a very essential thing.
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So what we chose to work on with my teams, and some of them here in Armenia, became a real need for every single chip in the world. One thing though we missed is that we learn over time. So what you put in the design initially
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is not sufficient. Sometimes you find out new types of defects, new types of illnesses, new viruses. You need to protect yourself. Therefore, your chip needs to be reconfigurable, needs to be reprogrammable, needs to be adaptable to the new
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solutions. So we also build into the chip the programmability, the reconfigurability in advance. Now, if I think about all this, it's not very different from what we do in our body, what we do in human health. We have lots of things that are
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based on self-healing. Lots of wounds, lots of bones, lots of skins, they do self-healing. All what we're doing in chips is just mimicking what we have in our bodies. So if we are able to create chips that are resilient,
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that can protect themselves from the day they are born till the end of their life, we can do that in our lives as well. We are equipped to do that. We are equipped to be reprogrammed. We are equipped to be reconfigured as necessary.
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We are equipped to resist attacks. We are equipped to resist accidents. All what we are doing in chips to exist in ourselves as individuals and as societies. So I think even though we go through difficulties, through some challenges,
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such as the one we saw last year, last two years with illnesses, with other troubles, major difficulties, we need to be resilient. We need to feel responsible to readjust ourselves. We need to make ourselves available. We have to enable that resistance in
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ourselves, and that depends on us. Yes, we can get some help from outside as well, from each other, but with each other, we can create necessity. We're much less than 57 billion, but still, we can collaborate nicely and
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we can create that resilience in ourselves. So I think learning from that adjustment, learning from what we created inside the chips, it's not the chips don't create themselves. We create them, but we also can learn from what we
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created and try to activate that in ourselves, enable ourselves, and have the right ecosystem around us to make sure that we are resilient enough, we adjust ourselves fast enough, we go back full force, work at full performance, and be healthy and happy.
Speaker A
Thank you. [Applause]
Topics:microchipsself-repairchip healthtechnology resiliencechip securityself-testingreconfigurable chipselectronic systemsTEDxYerevanYervant Zorian
