Indigenous chip to help simulate the Big Bang

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, March 19, 2007
Another feather was added to cap of Indian science on Monday. The Saha Institute of Nuclear Physics (SINP) and Semiconductor Complex Ltd, Chandigarh along with Aligarh Muslim University have come up with India’s first indigenously designed and manufactured microchip.
The chip has been selected by the world’s largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva to be used in one of their crucial experiments. But there is more to the chip — it can also be used to detect cancerous tumours, and it will be cheaper and more accurate than many other processes.
The Multiplexed Analog Signal (MANAS) processor has been accepted as the best possible chip internationally and will be used in a project at CERN — the world's largest particle physics laboratory in Geneva. CERN will be studying what happened just 1 microsecond after the Big Bang. To study this phenomenon, CERN will simulate a ‘little bang’ in its laboratory, where MANAS will be used to scan and take 1000 snapshots per second of the collision in the laboratory with the help of the ALICE detector.
“The scientists will use the images to find out from where the particles are coming out and where it is going. Through this we will not only be able to find out how the earth evolved but will also be able to trace the evolution of the universe till date,” said Bikash Sinha, director of SINP.
Talking about the unveiling of the chip, Sinha said: “This country has always been known for its work in the software sector, but we have not been able to do much in hardware till now. This is the first sep towards indigenous chip development in India.”
The chip has already been tested in Singapore, France, Italy and Russia. “CERN is an extremely competitive place and only after it was okayed by top world scientists, was the chip accepted,” said Sinha.
SNIP has produced 110,000 chips already and the experiment at CERN is scheduled to begin from November this year. “We got the project in 1996. Apart from the project at CERN, this chip will be of help to mankind in many other areas,” said Sukalyan Chattopadhyay, head of department of High Energy Physics at SNIP and head of this project.
Each chip would cost $10, and it is 7mm x 7 mm in dimension and has 10,000 transistors in it. Another advantage of MANAS is that it has 16 channels, which means that it can pick up signals from 16 places.
The data resolving power achieved by MANAS chip is comparable to the best in the world, and can also be used for detection of cancerous tumours. “Sometimes even MRI and CAT scan cannot detect tissue tumours. Since MANAS is an extremely high power scanner it can detect them very easily. If used for medical scanning it will not only give accurate results but will even cost less for the patients. We are trying to market his chip for medical purpose too,” said Sinha. Apart from this, the chip can be used in airport scanners and other scanning devices.
mou.hindustantimes@yahoo.com