“Nobody’s ever written a Star Trek episode about the world’s smallest microchip, only about the world’s smallest computer. Now, a team from the University of Michigan has built not just a very small microchip, but a whole functioning computer, and it’s less than a cubic millimeter in size. Called the Michigan Micro Mote, or M3, this tiny computer features processing, data storage, and wireless communication. Researcher Pabral Dutta thinks it will be the ‘next revolution in computing.’ The technology works with a very low-powered and low-range wireless standard to broadcast its latest state every few minutes. To power the M3, researchers fitted it with a tiny solar cell.”
