Cornell researchers have developed a way for an experimental microchip known as a "microwave brain" to encode messages into radio signals and compress data.
The work could support faster, more secure communications for satellites, drones and other technologies, according to a study published July 29 in Nature Communications.
The chip is an integrated microwave neural network that uses microwave physics to identify patterns and perform computations. Researchers said it can transform information, such as navigation commands, into distinctive microwave pulse tokens while using less bandwidth and energy than conventional communications systems.
The team also found that the chip can generate probabilistic bits from gigabit-per-second data streams. In a demonstration, researchers reconstructed a satellite image of a tropical storm while reducing the transmitted data by about eightfold and preserving many key features.
Researchers said the technology could provide hardware-based cybersecurity because decoding a transmission would require a compatible microwave neural network and the correct configuration sequence.
The study was led by Bal Govind in the lab of Alyssa Apsel, the IBM Professor of Engineering in Cornell's School of Electrical and Computer Engineering. The researchers have a patent pending and are working through Cornell's Ignite Innovation Acceleration program to advance the technology toward commercialization.
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