A chip that listens to the sky.
Every airliner broadcasts who and where it is, several times a second. HZN-1 hears those signals, decodes them, and estimates how much fuel each plane has left. Scroll to take it apart.
- ProcessSKY130 · 130 nm
- Die3 × 3 mm
- Clock50 MHz
- Tracks1,024 planes
Smaller than a fingernail.
The metal lid protects a slab of silicon about 3 mm on a side. Hair-thin gold wires connect it to the package, which plugs into a circuit board through a grid of solder balls.
Eight rooms, one job each.
Like rooms in a house, each area of the chip does one thing: listen to the antenna, decode messages, remember every plane, and estimate its fuel.
From radio blip to fuel estimate.
A city, stacked eleven floors high.
Pulled apart, the chip is a stack: switches at the bottom, then five levels of wiring that run like streets, avenues and highways. Tiny pillars called vias connect the floors.
About a million on/off switches.
Each spot where a red line crosses a green strip is a transistor, about 1/450 the width of a hair. Groups of them add numbers, compare them and remember them. That's all a chip is.
Every plane in the sky, with fuel left.
Fuel Horizon puts the chip's output on a globe. Each dot is a real flight from a recording that refreshes every hour, coloured by how much fuel it likely has left. A second mode asks whether it could have made the trip on batteries.
Within 5% of published fuel figures.
The fuel estimate uses a model of each exact aircraft type, tuned on 126 published fuel-burn figures and then tested on figures it never saw.
Take it for a spin.
The globe
Every flight in the air, refreshed hourly over satellite imagery. Click a plane for its route, fuel and electric twin, search any flight, open an airport's board, or replay the last 24 hours.
Open the globe Inside HZN-1Chip explorer
Rotate the chip yourself, click any layer or room, and step through a real aircraft message, including breaking its checksum.
Explore the chip Updated hourlyFuel & CO₂ dashboard
How much jet fuel is burning right now, the last 24 hours, which airlines and aircraft burn it, and what SAF, batteries, hybrids or hydrogen could save.
Open the dashboard ValidationModel check
How the fuel model compares with 126 published figures, before and after calibration, with every number in a table.
See the checkOne block, built for real
The checker that throws away damaged aircraft broadcasts, as an actual SkyWater 130 nm chip layout. Tested on real ADS-B messages, including KLM1023, and you can run it in your browser.
See the layout