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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.
its really more of an OBSERVATION than a LAW. a THEOREM at best. While it has held true through my short lifetime so far, it certainly does not qualify as a LAW.
I got it! Put the stuff inside a small glass vacuum bubble and make it hot so that electrons jump from one plate to another when............nevermind
Table-ized A.I.
That's a good question and the answer is "technology media coverage sucks".
Far-out technology ten or twenty years from plausible implementation makes a much better story then technology that's appearing on the shelf today, which is drowned out by the marketing message and if you're lucky, some semi-meaningful buzzwords.
However, the electronic industry is actually quite good about converting technology into actual products. It just isn't talked about as much because it's so "ho-hum". Let me remind you that 2,400,000,000,000 bits that fit in the palm of your hand is something so amazing that you really can't even understand it in any real way.
Look into the technologies in current use for hard drive manufacturing, processor manufacturing, and the other such hardware you use day to day (including non-computer stuff). You'll find enough stuff to make a 1970's sci-fi author wet their pants. It just doesn't make good copy.
Gordon Moore made his famous observation in 1965, just four years after the first planar integrated circuit was discovered. This law was finally proven in 1989 with the release of the vernable 486(TM) DX processor from Intel.
Due to incredible market forces and other mysterious occurences that remain unexplained to this time, chip speed doubled every two years. This remained true even through the infamous Intel factory shutdown in 1991.
The plant was closed for a period of seventeen months due to widespread worker illness. The engineers at Intel had been under tremendous pressure to design a new chip that would double the speed of the impressive 486 DX. Sadly, the engineers were stumped. Adding to this incredible pressure was the unexplanable illness that spread about the facillity like wildfire. This illness would render an otherwise healthy person unconscious for a period of seventeen months. The afflicted person would then rise as if nothing had happened.
Intel enginners were some of the last to be affected by this mysterious illness, and when it struck, there remained little choice but to shutter the plant.
Seventeen months passed, and the lights of the Intel factory remained dim. Offerings by Cyrix and AMD began to overtake Intel's flagship 486 processor.
Suddenly, the enginners began to regain unconsciousness one by one. Strangely, they all had a similar vision while under the illnesses grasp. They begain to call each other on the telephone, comparing notes on what they had 'seen'.
Cautiously, they began to draw plans - plans that would save the great Intel from ruin.
Work went quickly, as each enginner 'knew' what the others were thinking. Soon, the plant was reopened, and fabrication of of the new design began. The engineers collectively decided that the chip would be called the "Pentium". Asked a short time before his unseemly death, an enginner said, "It just HAD to be named that. I don't know why. But we all agreed."
Sadly, the chip that propelled a limping Intel into the forefront of CPU technology was the last that any of the 'Pentium' designers saw to fruition.
Tragedy struck the enginners as they were on their way to the company picnic. The bus that they were riding in plummeted off an embankment into a river, drowning all of them.
Gordon Moore's famous 1965 observation was voted into law in 1994, one year after the release of the new chip. The punishment for violators is death by mysterious circumstance. No one has yet broken Moore's Law, and woe be unto those that do.
Thanks,
Jonathan Frakes
P.S. In your ear, Mr. Smarty-pants.
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...
*****"I think we've picked the winner, something that will allow this thing we call Moore's Law to continue on for another 50 years. I used to think it was impossible. Now I think it's inevitable."****
This seems to be a stretch of the imagination. Moore's law defines, specifically "the number of components per integrated function" doubles every 12-24 months (is historically slightly more than 24 months), but is also (perhaps improperly) used to say that performance of processors doubles in that time.
In any case, following the progression of Moore's law from 1965 to today and through for the next 50 years reveals a minor (perhaps major) flaw in this scientist's assertion.
1971: 2,250 - Intel 4004
1982: 120,000 - Intel 80286
1993: 3.1 million - Intel Pentium
2003: 55 million - Intel P4 Northwood
2013: 1.76 billion
2023: 56 billion
2033: 1.8 trillion
2043: 57.6 trillion
2053: 1,840 trillion
The atomic diameter of an average old atom of some metallic element that would be used in transistor fabrication is about 10^-10 meters. The atoms in their molecular "crossbar" technology would be much larger, plus inter-atom spacing of about 0.3nm... we can assume there would be an element every 1nm.
With 1.84 quadrillion elements per component, we're talking 42 million components on a side, assuming uniform density and perfect 100% usage of space on the atomic level, these chips are just about half a meter in size.
Ok, so I proved myself wrong! Moores law has the TECHNICAL possibilty of holding true for the next 48 years. Beyond which, atomic structures themselves make the process of shrinking the components all but impossible.
Stewed Squirrel
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who don't.
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.