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The issue with this is while the transistors for the CPU scale like that, the structures to do wireless transmission don't. If you go high enough in frequency

The issue with this is while the transistors for the CPU scale like that, the structures to do wireless transmission don't. If you go high enough in frequency that you can make it on the same scale as the CPU, you're in frequency ranges that are trivially absorbed by water. Which your device is surrounded by. Sure, you can just keep upping the power of the applied field to get enough energy to the chip to do something useful, but it has this messy side effect of causing heating. If you're OK with boiling the bodily fluids of person the chip is in, it'll work great! > note, this is quite different to the boring RFID sealed in some bubble which people get subcutaneous, thats been a thing since pet-chipping and before. I'm talking active electronics here RFID capsules are active. That's how they work. They're powered by inductive coupling into a coil in the device. Interestingly, their size is largely set by the power coupling requirements, so at least to some extent they are basically what you're trying to describe, only actually implemented within the constraints of reality. > Injectable VLSI is a research space. Lol

kongin 5y ago
>The issue with this is while the transistors for the CPU scale like that, the structures to do wireless transmission don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna To go over it a bit more: the higher the frequency of radiation the smaller you can make the antenna. However in the frequencies we have the technology to send signals in, and don't intrinsically give you cancer, everything becomes more opaque when you increase frequency. As OP says, it's like trying to send a light flash from behind a concrete wall, when you can see it on the other side you're using enough energy to vaporise the concrete anyway. This is basically the only reason why we aren't living in a surveillance dystopia to make the Matrix look tame. Thank you physics for limiting the amount of possible surveillance from smart dust. That said, you could still use chemical or physical means of communicating with microchips inside you, the issue is that you're very limited in how much information you can send without having them come in contact with some type of macroscopic io device.

kongin 5y ago

>The issue with this is while the transistors for the CPU scale like that, the structures to do wireless transmission don't. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna To go over it a bit more: the higher the frequency of radiation the smaller you can make the antenna. However in the frequencies we have the technology to send signals in, and don't intrinsically give you cancer, everything becomes more opaque when you increase frequency. As OP says, it's like trying to send a light flash from behind a concrete wall, when you can see it on the other side you're using enough energy to vaporise the concrete anyway. This is basically the only reason why we aren't living in a surveillance dystopia to make the Matrix look tame. Thank you physics for limiting the amount of possible surveillance from smart dust. That said, you could still use chemical or physical means of communicating with microchips inside you, the issue is that you're very limited in how much information you can send without having them come in contact with some type of macroscopic io device.