Organic Materials for Digital Signal Processing

Other Unique Engineering Ideas

Digital signal processing using organic and chemical materials without electrical currents will be the wave of the future. Performing digital signal processing using organic and chemical materials without electrical currents could be the wave of the future. In general DSP uses mathematics and other techniques to manipulate signals like images (natural medical, and others) and sound waves after those signals have been converted to a digital form. This can enhance images and compress data for storage and transmission, and such processing chips are found in cell phones, iPods, and HD TVs.

1. Description

2. Why

3. How

4. Future Trends

5. Related Links

Useful Links: DSP (1, 2), Organic electronics, and Organic semiconductors

Description

In the past 10 years, scientists and engineers around the world have experimented with performing signal processing using different materials. In their piece, Tsaftaris and Katsaggelos describe these experiments while stirring the engineering community towards “a possible not-so-electronic future” of digital signal processing. These processing tasks extend beyond chemicals to organic materials.

Use Organic Materials in DSP: Why?

  • Certain chemicals when mixed in a solution don’t react until light is projected through them. So if you project light through a transparency image, these chemicals can record the image.
  • Excellent medium for data storage.
  • Can also be easily replicated.
  • Digital samples can be easily recorded.
  • When the chemicals are stimulated by light and controlled by the acidity of the mixture, basic image transformations like contour enhancement can happen.
  • Artist/scientist Cameron Jones found that out after he used audio CDs as substrates to grow fungi.

How Does It Work  

In 2005, a group modified E. coli cells to react to light, and the students created a layer of these bacteria that could perform edge detection of an image – a basic processing task.“The bacteria reacted to the recorded information, and the audio track was ‘processed’ by the grown fungus,” Tsaftaris says. “That is essentially bacterial signal processing.”Tsaftaris’s and Katsaggelos’s research includes studying the use of DNA for digital signal processing. DNA strands can be used as input and processing elements, and DNA is an excellent medium for data storage. Digital samples can be recorded in DNA, which can be kept in a liquid form in test tubes to save space. DNA can also be easily replicated using common laboratory techniques, and such a database could be easily searchable, no matter how large it is.

Future Trends        

Using bacteria to process signals has even spurred a competition – the International Genetically Engineered Machine Competition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where undergraduate students compete to design biological systems that can perform simple computations.Though science is still years away from this possibility, engineers have created useful algorithms in their pursuit of the technology. Such algorithms have been used, for example, to better detect disease.But Tsaftaris hopes for a day when organic digital signal processing will allow for the implementation of the so-called “fast Fourier transform” — a widely-used method of extracting useful information from sampled signals that Tsaftaris calls the “holy grail” of DNA signal processing.“.. DNA equipment is getting even…cheaper, such that anybody can process the signals in the office and later at home pull out their Discovery’s DNA Explorer Kit or CSI’s DNA Lab Kit and with their kids (or alone, satisfying their inner child) manipulate and analyze DNA in their living room.”.

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