A few months ago, a hoax took hold of social networks: the vaccine against covid-19 would contain 5G microchips that would allow tracing those vaccinated to recover private data. Is this possible?
Ironically, this rumor emerged almost 56 years after Gordon Moore, one of the founders of Intel, enunciated an empirical law that indicated the doubling of the number of transistors in a computer chip every two years or so. This law is still valid today, when elementary electronic components, transistors, already reach nanometric sizes.
The first electronic components were made with vacuum bulbs that contained filaments and grids called triodes. By heating and electrostatic effect, weak electrical signals can be amplified. This allowed the first wireless transmission of Morse code signals in the early 20th century. Bulky, fragile, expensive and operating at high voltages, they will be replaced by so-called solid-state technologies with crystals of semiconductor material.
The semiconductor component that performs the amplification function was developed in the 1950s and the trade name was chosen by the Bell Laboratories that invented it: transistor. The first integrated circuit, that is, the possibility of making several transistors connected to each other directly in the semiconductor crystal, was realized at the end of the 60s.
In an industrial way, the square circuits are made side by side to facilitate their cutting before packaging. In 2021, IBM has just announced the creation of a transistor with an active area of 2 nanometers (that is, about twenty atoms placed side by side).
A geometry problem
So how many transistors could be etched into a square piece of integrated circuit that would fit into the hole of the syringe used for the vaccine? The circuit is square, the needle is circular with an inner diameter of 0.6 mm. We started with electronics and here we have a geometry problem that would give a schoolboy a hard time.
The side of the square that can fit a 0.6mm diameter circle is 0.424mm. This makes it possible to manufacture 1.8 billion transistors (for a transistor with a surface area of 10 nm x 10 nm), as many as in the chips that equip the latest processors in well-known brand telephones.
Thus, in a vaccine injection syringe it is possible to insert a watertight electronic chip with the same calculation capacity as current mobile phones. It still has to communicate with the outside world and be electrically powered.
Everything hangs by a thread
It is not only a problem of size, because the injected chip must communicate with the outside of the human body without cables. So you have to make antennas on the chip for wireless communication.
This time it is Maxwell’s equations that will have to be used to size the antennas. James Clerk Maxwell, a 19th-century Scottish physicist and mathematician, demonstrated that the electromagnetic fields used in the wireless transmissions of our smartphones travel through space like a wave at the speed of light.
According to Maxwell’s equations, the ideal size of an antenna should be equal to the ratio of the speed of light to the frequency of electromagnetic waves (the wavelength). Submultiples of this ideal size (½, ¼, ⅛…) can also be used to limit clutter at the cost of detection. Today’s 5G uses frequency bands around 3.5 GHz. By choosing a submultiple of ¼ to limit the size of the antenna, you have to build a 2.1 cm antenna so that the chip can communicate wirelessly with the exterior of the human body.
At that size, the entire surface of the chip is not enough to make the antenna even coil-shaped. This is something we all know if we play sports and go to a well-known sports store: every item we buy has an RFID chip. The only really visible part of the chip is the coil-shaped antenna.
At that size, the entire surface of the chip is not enough to make the antenna even coil-shaped. This is something we all know if we play sports and go to a well-known sports store: every item we buy has an RFID chip. The only really visible part of the chip is the coil-shaped antenna.
The chip in your ear
Dogs and cats are pioneers in this field, since the identification plate has been replaced by the implantation of a subcutaneous chip. The device measures about ten millimeters and simply contains a unique number that can be read without contact. This number is read by bringing the reading system closer to the animal’s ear or neck.
And this is the case with all wireless data transmission technologies: the distance between the implanted chip and the reader is small, often only a few centimeters. First, the data must be secured to avoid the possibility of remote detection of the information exchanged; second, because the power emitted by an antenna decreases with distance cubed. To increase the reading distance, it is necessary to increase the transmitted power and, therefore, the volume of the battery.
How can we easily quantify this to answer our initial question? Between complicated units, complex mathematical equations, and results highly dependent on experimental conditions, the question seems simple, but the scientific answer is not.
To try to give an answer to the question of how to size a battery, we can look at that of a mobile phone: the autonomy of a phone is 1 km for a battery volume of about 10 cm3. Assuming that half the volume of the chip injected with the vaccine is occupied by the battery, the range of the chip would be 0.4 cm. Therefore, given the size of the battery, the chip will have to be in contact with the reading system to exchange information.
Can you put a chip in a vaccine or not?
The processor of a 5G chip could be injected through the hole in the needle used to inject the vaccine. The range would be short and would require a reading system in contact with the skin.
On the contrary, it is impossible today to get the antenna for the exchange of information.
The frequencies used in wireless telephony transmissions have multiplied by 10 in the last twenty years. Therefore, extrapolating this law, it will be 60 years before the frequency of wireless transmissions allows the creation of antennas small enough to inject a chip into a vaccine. By then, we will all have been vaccinated against covid-19.
Jean-Marc Routoure, Professor of electronics, University of Caen Normandie
Este artículo fue publicado originally in The Conversation. Lea el original.
