This may be extreme, or, completely stupid, but, why are we not using genetics to "grow" chips in a chemical soup yet? Similar to Verilog/VHDL, don't we have some similar language to express circuits using gene sequences?
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I've worked for one of Europe's biggest synthetic biology labs and I know lots of biologists are low-key interested, but current players in semiconductors see it as kind of a tarpit.
IBM used to have a program using DNA origami for lithography back in 2009, which makes sense as lithography masks are a pain to make. I really wish I know why the program was stopped, but most of the researchers are retired by now.
As to whether you can just "grow" the whole chip from scratch, the answer is probably, but it would require lots of non-trivial scientific discoveries. For instance, we can't really make sizable chips using DNA without horrible defect rates. Biology is much better at making redundant rube goldberg machines, than very precise machines with no tolerance for errors.
I think we'd have a better chance of success if we made very weird kinds of chips that better took advantage of the medium, perhaps even something that we "train" rather than just use out of the box.
I'd love it if anyone here knew more about this !
Would it be comparatively easy to make neuromorphic chips instead of traditional chips? I believe probabilistic algorithms like those employed by LLM's must be more tolerable to working with defects as well..?
Yeah, so neuromorphic chips aren't particularly good at running (current) LLMs, in fact they would suck at it compared to GPUs. Neuromorphic chips are awesome for very niche, small kinds of neural networks used in robotics and edge devices.
However, I think you're right in the sense that neural networks can tolerate dead parameters pretty well, so maybe some kind of AI training or inference chip could be made with more fault-prone methods.
At the end of the day, chips are useless if nobody's willing to write software to run on them. Biologics would likely be good at making weird new kinds of chips, and they'd need a massive edge for anyone to care.
We lack robust frameworks for 'forward engineering' stochastic thermodynamic computation over molecular free-energy landscapes (which is basically what a "chemical soup" is doing) like we do for analog/optical/digital computing. This is why, as a field, medicine is so heavily empirical and reverse engineering oriented.
Man... I had to chatgpt your comment just to understand. But I do now.
Basically, unlike current chip manufacturing process where every stage is deterministic and precise, the soup-world, the chemistry, is not. And we do not have accurate enough models to handle them in deterministic way, or, model them precisely.
My respect for nature's engineering just shot up by 10 times more.
Are referencing the 1998 short story "Taklamakan" by Bruce Sterling?
Thanks.. just looked it up. Seems super interesting.
Do that at scale
Bacteria do that at scale, far far bigger than all chips combined. All it takes is chemical soup and a few starter seed dna's.
Ah, so we're not talking creating full on brains after-all?