As long as it doesn’t burn my popcorn, I don’t care

No idea if this will end up being used for anything, but it sounds cool.

This seems very useful, I just wonder whether it can interface with other digital components easily.

My understanding of why digital computers rose to dominance was not any superiority in capability but basically just error tolerance. When the intended values can only be "on" or "off," your circuit can be really poor due to age, wear, or other factors, but if it's within 40% of the expected "on" or "off" state, it will function basically the same as perfect. Analog computers don't have anywhere near tolerances like that, which makes them more fragile, expensive, and harder to scale production.

I'm really curious if the researchers address any of those considerations.

Analog computers were also bulkier, had more mechanical complexity, and required higher power to operate and generated more heat as a consequence. The Heathkit EC-1 logic circuits operated at 0-100V. There are some real physics problems with scaling analog circuits up to higher complexity.

Reading the article, I learned that the author does not really have a clue what he is talking about.

A mechanical clock is anything but analog. Look up what an escape wheel is for if you doubt it.

For "analog is easier" keep in mind that it is very hard to get chip based circuits do precisely reproducable analog behavior. Indeed, this is one of the main reasons why we have digital computer chips: the output of the circuit is sufficiently unambiguous.

And "can run things in parallel" - That's what e.g. FPGAs are for. One if my designs runs audio compression on 32 channels with a meagre 12MHz clock, among many, many other tasks. All at the same time.

I found some more articles that have more substance. It seems to me that it is a programmable device that is an analogue recreation of digital neural network design with the benefits of real time processing of data streams without conversion or sampling and doing it at lower power consumption that current digital technology.

Cornell researchers build first ‘microwave brain’ on a chip

Cornell engineers have built the first fully integrated “microwave brain” — a silicon microchip that can process ultrafast data and wireless signals at the same time, while using less than 200 milliwatts of power. Instead of digital steps, it uses analog microwave physics for real-time computations like radar tracking, signal decoding, and anomaly detection. This unique neural network design bypasses traditional processing bottlenecks, achieving high accuracy without the extra circuitry or energy demands of digital systems.

ScienceDaily (www.sciencedaily.com)

Just a moment...

(scienceblog.com)

Tech news seem latch on to the words parallel and wireless because the chip operates with microwaves in a mesh¹ processing configuration but confuse what it means in this context.

Very cool, I'm curious to learn more.

¹ or "mush", as quoted by the researches themselves

Heads up if you're a microwave popcorn person - they're apparently choc full of microplastics. Think it was a recent Veritasium video I learned that in and stopped buying them.

Here's Cornell's own press release https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/08/researchers-build-first-microwave-brain-chip