These self-destructing electronics can turn your data to dust on command
A radio signal tells the components to vaporize.
Engineers have come up with a trick to make electronics disintegrate from far away. The technology represents a new kind of transient electronics, which are designed to disappear when they’re no longer needed. In this case, chemicals that can destroy the circuit stay sealed away — until you unlock them with radio waves. This means that if a device containing these electronics were stolen, you could remotely order it to self-destruct, wiping its data.
“It literally goes into the air,” says Amit Lal, a professor of electrical engineering at Cornell University and one of the researchers behind the new design. “Very little remnants of it are left behind.”
Scientists are hoping to use transient electronics to build medical implants that vanish instead of requiring surgical removal. Or they might appear in sensors deposited in forests and oceans to measure things like pollution or carbon dioxide levels. That way people or robots wouldn’t have to go collect them later.
Other researchers are designing transient electronics that use water or heat to initiate self-destruction. But that approach has some drawbacks — you don’t…
