TeraHertz Molecular Switch Arrays

Bfaber wrote in about researchers at the University of Illinois having come up with a method to produce atomic-scale TeraHertz switches. It's possible that when attached to specifically designed molecules, these puppies would act like transistors that can switch at 100 trillion times a second. Kind of throws MHz right out the window, don't it?

Comments

Re:If you're Bill Joy, Clap Your Hands!

[Anonymous Coward]

>>>100 Thz! And at molecular scales. I think we'd legitimately be able to recreate all of the brain's neural connections and interactions with technology like this. I'd like to rebut that statement with a simple thought problem. Please don't take offense this is just my opinion:

Raw speed does not magic make. Imagine if AMD dropped a few thousand gigahertz Athlons on the homebrew computer club back in the pre-Altair days. Do you think those hobbyists (or damn near anyone for that matter) could have created an OS with anything like the complexity of FreeBSD? No of course not. They still would have had to climb the learning curve, building information as they went.

I'm not saying Thz won't help us eventually reach brain-type computing; what I AM saying is that an ultrafast microprocessor is not going to result a priori in a "thinking machine"...

Recall that the magic of the human brain is not a single blinding fast unit; rather it is by _MAsSiVe_PaRrAlLeLiSm_ that we believe our brains do all that info-crunching.

In other words I'm saying that when we finally DO create a silicon 'brain', I'll bet blood that the researchers turn around and say "If we only knew lemmas X, Y and Z in 1987 then we could have built this thing with 68000's." It's not the raw horsepower that counts, its the COMPLEXITY and ORDERING of that horsepower.

IMHO.

mu!

Correction: 10 femtosecond (comp w/ state of art)

[orpheus]

The article stated "switching arrays running at 100 terahertz", but as many of you seem to have grasped intuitively, this is actually misleading or inaccurate.

For the record, as far as I can tell, after a little background surfing, and some BOTE calculations (similar calulations were often 'background exercises' for the student of molecular biology ) it appears they are talking about:

10 femtosecond (e-14) switching times NOT an operating speed of 100 terahertz (e14) The term "femtosecond switching" will allow you to more accurately find existing work in the field. Switching in sub-10 femtosecond range has been around for years, at this same 'bench theory' level of investigation.

This is a very interesting piece of work, but hardly a breakthrough when 2 femtosecond capacitor switching was announced in 1997 (I had my doubts then, but didn't check it out) and 2-5 femtosecond laser optical switching has probably been around even longer

You can immediately deduct 1+ order of magnitude from the risetime to get a practical operating speed (you want digital square waves, not sawtooths, right?) even when this switching speed becomes a practical reality.

You can also deduct a few orders of magnitude from the operating speed of a single switch to the operating speed of a CPU or RAM. Think about how many sequential transistor operations there are in a single RAM bit (on-chip, on-card, and system transistors)

And now, as a public service to those of you who need a refresher (we'll all need these terms soon enough)

Exp:
-12 pico- # Spanish pico, "a bit"
+12 tera- # Greek teras, "monster"

-15 femto- # Danish-Norweg. femten, "fifteen"
+15 peta- # Greek pente, "five"

-18 atto- # Danish-Norweg. atten, "eighteen"
+18 exa- # Greek hex, "six"

-21 zopto- # Latin septem, "seven"
+21 zetta- # Latin septem, "seven"

-24 yocto- # Greek or Latin octo, "eight"
+24 otta- # Greek or Latin octo, "eight"

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