Key Takeaways
A DARPA-funded study describes working computer chips grown from living fungal mycelium that use the material's structure to compute.
The method, called physical reservoir computing, lets the researchers tune what a chip does by shaping how the mycelium grows.
The team reports more than three million chips per harvest at under a dollar each, though the approach remains an early proof of concept.
A team backed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency says it has built working computer chips out of living mushroom material, and that the grown structure of the fungus can do real computation.
The work, published June 10 in Scientific Reports and first posted as a bioRxiv preprint, describes what the authors call morphologically tunable mycelium chips for physical reservoir computing. Reservoir computing uses the messy dynamics of a physical material, in this case the branching network a fungus grows, to process signals the way a small neural network would. By shaping how the mycelium grows, the researchers say they can tune what the chip computes, a method they describe as programming with morphology rather than code.
Cheap, grown, and analog
The pitch is as much about manufacturing as computing. The team reports that a single harvest can yield more than three million chips, that the chips stay stable after three months, and that each one costs less than a dollar. The group, which includes Ecovative founder Eben Bayer, lays out a design, grow, and compute pipeline that models a structure, grows it, slices it, and reads computation off the result. Bayer framed the chips as an early step toward biological computing hardware.
The caveats are real. Reservoir computing is a niche approach, and a low-cost analog chip is not about to replace the silicon inside a phone or a data center. What is notable is the direction, hardware that is grown rather than etched and that runs on biology. It belongs in the same frontier-tech file as work WYDE has covered like Aleph's ultrasound of a living brain and Tessel Bio's generative chemistry model. Worth watching.
People Also Ask
What are mycelium chips?
They are computing chips made from grown fungal mycelium. The structure of the fungus is used to process signals, an approach called physical reservoir computing.
Who funded the research?
The work was funded by DARPA and published in Scientific Reports by a team that includes Ecovative founder Eben Bayer.
How much do the chips cost?
The researchers report that a single harvest can produce more than three million chips, each costing less than a dollar, and that the chips remain stable after three months.
Will mycelium chips replace silicon?
Not soon. Reservoir computing is a niche method, and these analog bio-chips are a proof of concept rather than a replacement for conventional processors.