全球首款“微波大脑”芯片，技术新革命

Core Viewpoint - Researchers at Cornell University have developed a revolutionary silicon chip, termed the "microwave brain," which processes information similarly to a living brain using controlled microwave energy pulses instead of traditional clock-driven processors [2][4]. Group 1: Chip Design and Functionality - The "microwave brain" can handle two tasks simultaneously: processing high-speed data streams and enabling wireless communication, all within a compact size comparable to a smartwatch, with a power consumption of only 200 milliwatts [4]. - The chip's design abandons traditional sequential digital methods, utilizing tunable microwave waveguides to transmit information at tens of gigahertz frequencies in real-time, eliminating bottlenecks [5]. - Each waveguide acts like a "physical neuron," where the amplitude, phase, and frequency of microwave signals can be shaped to represent data features, allowing for rich pattern generation before digitization [5]. Group 2: AI Integration and Performance - This chip integrates an artificial intelligence framework directly into the hardware, leveraging the natural behavior of microwaves to process incoming data streams without the need for extensive memory storage or repeated calculations [6]. - In tests, the chip achieved a classification accuracy of 88% or higher for wireless signals, comparable to much larger digital chips, maintaining stable accuracy across both simple and complex tasks without the need for additional circuits [6]. Group 3: Potential Applications and Future Development - The hardware's sensitivity to signal behavior allows for applications beyond AI computing, such as monitoring wireless traffic anomalies, tracking radar targets, and decoding congested radio channels [6]. - The research team, supported by DARPA and NSF, is working on scaling and integrating the chip into existing microwave and digital systems, potentially blurring the lines between computing and communication hardware [7].