Slashdot Mirror
Reinventing The Transistor For Molecular Computing
unnique writes "MIT's Technology Review, has an article on HP's research into finding a new way to make transistors smaller, and further stretching Moore's law." The article has some nice illustrations of the nano-componentry they're working on, too.
The basic computing element will of course keep getting smaller and faster, until it reaches certain physical limits which cannot be exceeded. At this point, a new paradigm will be invented to provide the way beyond the limits.
How small can something be? It can be down to the molecular level. How fast can something go? Up to the speed of light. So eventually the fastest "transistor" will be composed of individual molecules, with changing states caused and communicated by light (photons).
Electricity was stated in the article as "the way" that information will be input and extracted from tiny transistor, but I think this paradigm will change! Once you get to a certain speed and smallness, electricity loses its ability to transmit information. This happens due to sluggish time response properties of the medium (capacitance and inductance and other jazz) and wave interference and delay of the electrical wave of electrons flowing.
Once a wavelength (directly related to frequency) becomes a certain fraction of the distance it has to travel, the electrical path becomes a "transmission line" instead of a "lumped element." Basically you are trying to send waves of electricity (1's and 0's) down the line too fast for the physical capabilities of the medium. So that's one more thing that complicates the process of making computers smaller and faster--getting the information out and transmitting it to other components.
That's why I was mentioning a new paradigm...because I was thinking of reading Isaac Asimov's stories that mentioned his ultimate computer, Multivac, which filled up miles and miles of space underground. He extrapolated the ideas that made the cutting edge computers of his time into what he thought the future's computer would be like--namely, huge. But of course he couldn't predict the advent of the transistor and later the microprocessor which changed everything and made everything shrink instead of getting bigger....by the way--some parts in computers, like the connectors and traces, are already becoming speed bottlenecks for some of the reasons mentioned...
You know, alot of people talk about the death of moore's law, but uh, has anyone ever considered the possibility that moore's law might keep going and going and going ad infinitum?
It isn't impossible. Theoretically when you get down to quantum computers where your using atomic mater itself your almost at the smallest possible size for computation, until you break down the individual peices of the positrons and electrons into quarks and gluons which could possibly be used for calculation, then you think about creating an artificial black hole and stuffing ever more matter into a singularity and you could calculate the universe from something the size of the head of a pin (especially if you adhere to the multiverse theory, which states there are infinite realities). If there are infinite realities, we could litterally collapse our own reality, and possibly others nearby into a singularity for calculation, and just keep on going and going and going.
Truly as we begin to see the emergence of quantum computers we start to head towards these paths for higher and higher calculations, instead of knowing a universe around us, abit at a time. We could know it all at once, in all it's enormousness. We could then know and create others (computation being equivilant according to babbage, a computer simulating a reality perfectly is in fact a new reality as our reality is nothing but mathematical laws anyhow).
While I know moore's law can fail us at any time now being a theory and not a fact. Dismissing it as most do so casually after it has perservered time and time again for so many decades running is really getting to be rather ridiculous.