Computation Using Saltwater: Noa Edri Fraiman Won an Award for One of the Outstanding Demonstrations at ISCAS 2025

PhD student Noa Edri Fraiman won an award for best live demo at the IEEE's ISCAS 2025 conference held in London last May. More than 1,000 papers were presented at the conference, the largest of its kind in the realm of circuits and systems. Edri Fraiman demonstrated an innovative project currently under work as a collaboration between Prof. Alex Fish's lab at the Faculty of Engineering in Bar-Ilan, and Prof. Gilad Yossifon's from Tel Aviv University. The demonstration presented an iontronic integrated circuit based on nanofluid components, which enables electrical control of ions within a solution.

"I was curious to see if we can approach electric circuits from another direction and implement what we learned as engineers in ionic circuits as well," she says. 
"At the conference, we presented a measurement and demonstration system, built on a PCB, designed to allow engineers to experiment for the first time with integrated iontronic circuits. This was the first time such a circuit was presented outside the lab, and it was exciting to see the extent of curiosity and fascination it provoked."

Noa Edri Fraiman is at the final stages of her PhD project. After completing her BSc in electrical engineering at theBen-Gurion University, she joined Bar-Ilan University and Prof. Alex Fish's lab. "For my master's, I wanted to focus on classic electronics in the areas that are most relevant to the industry, and so I worked on embedded memories with optimal energy consumption," she explains. "After my master's I worked for several years at EnICS labs, at the System-on-Chip laboratory.

In my role as a verification engineer, I took part in close collaborations with industry partners, which made this period both meaningful and formative for me".

During that time, Noa also became the supervisor of Prof. Alex Fish's research lab. This unique combination of industry experience in the field of SoC design and the world of academic research motivated her to resume research and delve deeper by pursuing a PhD.

On a mission (?): Hardware Inspired by Biological SystemsHer research utilizes tools from the realm of electronics to develop hardware that is based not only on electronics but also touches upon the realm of biology. " In electronics, extensive experience has been gained in the gradual transition from a single component, to a circuit, and then to a system—a process that enables modular and hierarchical design of complex hardware. My goal is to explore whether a similar process can be applied in other fields as well. At the same time, I am interested in asking whether we can learn from the principles of biology to expand the possibilities of computation.. That's how I got into DNA-based computation—following Prof. Hillel Kugler's course on biological computation—or the idea of communication via molecules, which is something that came up during a joint project suggested by Prof. Rachela Popovtzer," shares Edri Fraiman. "That got the ball rolling—something very different, strange even. But when you think about it, systems that are based on biological principles have become very prominent in the engineering world in recent years. The whole AI world, for instance, was inspired by biological structures such as neural networks. Our research tries to learn from these principles and move closer to the matter biology utilizes and the environment in which it operates—for example, developing circuits that operate in a watery medium, or use ions instead of electrons as data carriers. This is far more similar to the way our bodies process information."

In her research, Edri Fraiman and Prof. Fish collaborated with Prof. Gilad Yossifon's lab at Tel Aviv University. Yossifon has a background in mechanical engineering and specializes in nanofluidic devices. " The idea that initially seemed imaginary became real, thanks to our collaboration.. Prof. Yossifon and his team brought their expertise in developing nanofluidic devices, and we brought our knowledge of electronics and circuits. We worked together to bring these two worlds together, to take a single component and turn it into a part of acircuit, then connect several components to create a system capable of performing computations," she explains. "I worked with his doctoral student, Barak Sabbagh, and it was a long process. We progressed step-by-step, from a single component to a logic gate, then connected several gates until eventually we were able to build the largest integrated computation circuit to have been developed using this technology thus far."

The potential of mixing electricity and water

This circuit, revolutionary though it may be, came with many challenges. "At first we had to measure the fluid chip right after it was manufactured otherwise it would dry out," she shares. "Additionally, the more complex the circuit got, with more gates and components, the more we needed control and measuring lines, which made advancing to bigger circuits a real challenge."

To overcome these hurdles, Edri Fraiman together with the research team hooked the circuit to a printed circuit board (PCB), as you do with typical electronic circuits, and added a sealing layer to prevent evaporation. "These two steps allowed us to manufacture a compact, long-lasting measuring and demonstration platform, which made our work easier and allowed us to demonstrate the system in a more accessible manner," she elaborates. "We didn't just want to build the circuit; we wanted to make the technology accessible so that more people can take it into account and come up with new ideas."

Edri Fraiman and Prof. Fish took their board to ISCAS. "At the conference, we demonstrated a working chip controlled by a microcontroller and let visitors try it out for themselves—switch entrances, see how the computation circuit reacts, inject the ion solution, and see how it affects electric behavior," describes Edri Fraiman. "We didn't know what reactions to expect. At the end of the day, we're talking about a few logic gates, and electrical engineers might view that as too odd or too simple. But we stood there for nearly nine hours, and people just kept coming up, asking questions, expressing interest. We had deep conversations, exchanged emails, and even got a few collaboration proposals. It seems that this combination of water and electricity and a slightly non-traditional computation method got a lot of people curious." The demonstration earned them one of the conference's three Best Live Demo Awards.

New opportunities

Best Live Demo isn't the only award that Edri Fraiman has won lately. The Israel Innovation Authority's Biochip Consortium also recognized her innovative work, awarding her the Outstanding Researcher Award for developing a model for an iontronic diode; for designing, simulating, and analyzing iontronic circuits; and for her key role in realizing an iontronic demo system. Naturally, she published papers on the subject. A paper on realizing these circuits was published in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces Journal (read here), and her paper on the diode model was recently accepted by Nature Portfolio's Communications Engineering Journal.

The research continues: "In the next stage we want to see how you can really learn from the biological system and use the unique properties of ion-based components to perform computations, for instance, memory properties and the fact that there are different types of ions, as opposed to electrons that are only limited to a single type," she says. "We are also collaborating with Prof. Orit Shefi and trying to see if we can make integrated ionic circuits interface with neurons grown on chips. The road is long, but it's a fascinating field filled with opportunities."