A bee needs between 0.00001 and 0.01 watts to process navigation information in real time, while a high-end Intel chip requires 15 watts for comparable performance.
This difference in consumption, which can exceed a thousand times, is what has led a group of European researchers to look at the animal kingdom to rethink how we design GPS chips.
It should be noted that the InsectNeuroNano project, promoted by the European Union, works to translate this efficiency into real hardware. Therefore, if achieved, it would be a true technological milestone.
What no chip has managed to replicate
Bees do not depend on satellites or external signals to navigate. Its navigation system analyzes the polarization patterns of sunlight and combines them with flight speed data to calculate its position with surprising accuracy.
That process, which runs at about 10 trillion operations per second, operates with a tiny fraction of the energy consumed by any commercial navigation chip.
It is for this reason that what we seek to replicate in this project is the efficiency of the processing, not the complete biology of the insect.
The key is nanophotonic circuits that, unlike traditional chips, where information travels as an electrical signal, These circuits transmit data using light through nanometer-scale structures, that is, millionths of a meter..
This approach reduces power consumption, increases transmission speed and allows much smaller components to be manufactured.
Anders Mikkelsen, a professor at Lund University in Sweden, explains that using light for both sensing and processing simplifies the design considerably.
In his words, this dual function opens up the possibility of building chips the size of an insect’s gill, something unthinkable with today’s electronic architecture.
This is a prototype that could be a reality in the next decade
The team has already developed the first functional prototype in the laboratory. It is a concrete step that turns this research into applied technology, not just theory.
However, Mikkelsen is clear about the deadlines: Reaching a product that can be used on a daily basis requires approximately ten more years of development.
The applications handled by the project are precise. Since it could be implemented in very low-power drones capable of operating without depending on external GPS networks, robots the size of insects with autonomous navigation or wearables that locate without draining the battery.
In the end, they all share the same requirement, that they need chips that do a lot with very little power.
The technology industry has been betting on increasingly powerful chips for decades and This project follows a different logic, which instead of increasing gross capacity, seeks to maximize efficiency per watt consumed.
Sometimes the answer to an engineering problem lies in watching an insect weighing less than a gram solve the same problem with minimal resources, and having the ability to translate that into silicon.