Fluid Logic Chips

Doc Ruby writes "Colorado researchers 'have constructed microfluidic gates that use the relative flow resistance of liquid to carry out the basic logic operations NOT, AND, OR, XOR, NOR and NAND. The researchers have also combined a pair of gates into a half adder, which carries out half the operation of addition.' All CPUs processing binary logic are made of these types of gates, but usually execute as flows of electrons in wires, not fluids in tubes. Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing? Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

Comments

How fast?

[cbrocious]

How fast could this ever be? Neat, but I dunno how this could ever be put to a practical use. Cool hack none the less.

Re:How fast?

[Detritus]

Speed of Light vs. Speed of Sound in a Fluid?

Which is faster?

Re:How fast?

[ikewillis]

I think you mean the speed of electrons. Electrons can't travel the speed of light (in a vacuum)

Re:How fast?

[wass]

Practical uses? Well, for starters, it's microfluidics. So if we're lucky, we'll finally be able to get one of these babies into a package small enough to fit in a watch. You've always wanted a digital watch, right?

It's amusing, but in 1967 this Fluidic Amplifier was billed as "the simplest device known for setting up digital circuit applications."

Re:How fast?

[forkboy]

Electrons dont move through copper at the speed of light. However, they do move faster than sound does through a fluid.

Re:How fast?

[jellomizer]

Ok so lets say an electron can go at 1/10 the speed of light in a vacuum that is still a lot faster then we can move an object bigger then an atom.

Re:How fast?

[grumpygrodyguy]

Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing? Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

How fast could this ever be? Neat, but I dunno how this could ever be put to a practical use. Cool hack none the less.

In all likelyhood this will never be used as a replacement for silicon. It's much more likely that stuff like this will be used in bioinformatics & pharmacuetical circles in order to perform massively parallel tests on different molecular combinations.

If there are over 1,000,000 molecular permutations of a particular family of drugs(or DNA). Perhaps this kind of computer could rapidly cycle through all such combinations. Maybe the testing reaction could be performed with a liquid-mechanical ALU of sorts. Then the results could be stored in a liquid memory bank where they could be reviewed. Perhaps indicator dyes, or electrical dyes could be used to signal positive/negative results. *shrug*

Re:How fast?

[Detritus]

I mean the speed of electromagnetic radiation, not electrons. Which is in the neighborhood of 0.6c in coaxial cable.

Re:How fast?

[spectecjr]

I think you mean the speed of electrons. Electrons can't travel the speed of light (in a vacuum)

No, he means the speed of light. Electron flow speed has nothing to do with how fast electronic circuits can perform operations; it's the EM wave that is important, not the actual electronics themselves.

Think about it... you average processor speed is so fast that it's many bajillion times faster than the electrons can actually move. The clock signal is NOT transmitted as electrons - it simply can't be.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

You've got to admit, digital watches *are* a pretty neat idea.

Re:How fast?

[hunterx11]

You've always wanted a digital watch, right?

That and little green pieces of paper.

Re:How fast?

[wass]

Speed of light in vacuum, c, will always be faster than the speed of propogation of any particle, mode, or disturbance**.

The speed of light in a material is slower than in a vacuum, by a factor of the index of refraction (usually frequency dependent). Interestingly, it IS possible for particles to travel faster than this apparent speed of light, and in doing so they emit Cerenkov Radation, which is how many high-energy physics particle detectors (eg SNO) detect individual particles.

** For the nitpickers who will inevitably respond to that generalization, it is occasionally possible (in theory, at least) to set up a mode in some carefully-devised system where the speed of propogation of this mode is faster than c, but this mode cannot carry information. Simple example is a linear array of equally-spaced pendula, each with the same fundamental frequency, and with a spring connecting the weights at the bottom to the two pendula on either side. If a mode is set up where all pendula are oscillating at their fundamental frequency, all of them at exactly the same phase, (springs always remain at their unstretched length) then the phase velocity of this mode is infinite. However, there can be no 'information' or disturbance transmitted down the system. In reality, thermal and quantum disturbances would disrupt this mode and it would eventually become something much more complicated. These disturbances would be transmitted at a finite velocity, less than c.

Re:How fast?

[squidinkcalligraphy]

I remember a lecturer telling us a story about when his engineering team created a controller logic system using air pressure in tubes - it was to be used in the real world in a factory, because an electrical system was not plausible due to the possibility of sparks, etc. The system worked, right up until they connected it to the air pressure system in the factory, which was too dirty, and the logic gates got jammed really quickly.

So, yes, there are practical uses for these kinds of things.

Re:How fast?

[cbrocious]

You, sir, are a moron. They didn't invent a new mechanism for transmitting a signal. Electrons _have_ to be used.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

or perhaps a better assumption is if used in conjunction with self-constructing nano devices, simple program the nano devices to build a cpu out of materials already found inside a human body?!

Re:How fast?

[polecat_redux]

that is still a lot faster then we can move an object bigger then an atom.

True, but you wouldn't necessarily need to move a specific liquid molecule through an entire path/circuit. For example, say you have a tube filled with water, and you were to apply pressure on one end, almost instantly, water would be expelled from the other end. The "distance" that any single molecule of water along the path would need to travel depends only on how much water you want to get out of the other end.

For lack of a better analogy, it would be like poking someone with a stick rather than throwing a rock at them - travel time is mostly eliminated.

Re:How fast?

[Doc Ruby]

It *is* silicon - it just routes tiny, single-file fluid molecules through empty channels, rather than really tiny clouds of electrons through conductive channels.

Re:How fast?

[lubricated]

I had mod points but there is no mod of

Dumb -1

Re:How fast?

[Jerf]

almost instantly, water would be expelled from the other end.

You can quantify that better. It basically travels at the speed of sound in the medium, because it uses the same forces that sound does.

This is also the solution to the relativity paradox, "What if I take an infinitely rigid rod and tap it on one end, causing the other end to instantly vibrate, with the tap exceeding the speed of light?" The answer is that in this universe, no such infinitely rigid rod is possible; the maximum speed possible is still the speed of light.

This also implies that fluidic computing will always be slower than electronics, because the fundmental speed is orders of magnitudes slower. Which doesn't mean it is useless, I'm just killing two birds with one stone here, showing why this is no threat to electronics :-)

Re:How fast?

[imgod2u]

Yes, however, but the same argument, electrons don't neccessarily need to flow too far inside an electric circuit. Merely the shift in electric field is neccessary to indicate an on (5V let's say) or off(0V) state. Very little current actually needs to flow. Changes in the electric field propogates at the speed of light, so modern CPU's do, indeed, operate at the speed of light.

Re:How fast?

[imgod2u]

They are used, but just as fluidic dynamics doesn't require water molecules to move (or at least, move much), electronic signals do not require electrons to move very rapidly. The change in the electric field (the voltage) will propogate at the speed of light. That is how 1's and 0's are measured, by voltage, not current.

Re:How fast?

[wass]

You, sir, are a moron. They didn't invent a new mechanism for transmitting a signal. Electrons _have_ to be used.

This seems to be a common misperception on slashdot.

Electrons are certainly used, of course, in digital logic circuits. For example representing bits as charge stored in a capacitor, or by mediating the quantum statistics of a transistor for switching (by controlling the charge on the gate of a MOSFET).

However - when a signal is sent down a wire (eg, from a microprocessor, over the data bus, to a peripheral) that signal is NOT being sent through the electron drift. [Although electrons will drift in presence of an electric field, the drift velocity is INCREDIBLY small, look it up.]

If the microprocessor wants to flip a bit from a 0 to a 1, the wire is originally at one potential, and the microprocessor will change the potential. This disturbance isn't instantaneous along the wire, that would violate relativity. The microprocessor basically creates an electromagnetic disturbance that travels down the wire to the peripheral.

Now let's look at this 'disturbance' more closely. Electrons at point A are being ultimately effected by electrons at point B. This effect is mediated through electron interactions, and one knows that that the electromagnetic force is the mediator between electrons. And from Quantum Field Theory one knows that photons are the quanta of the electromagnetic force.

So what this in effect means is that whenever electrons are interacting, photons are being transmitted somewhere during that exchange. Thus, the parent was correct that it's the electromagnetic wave, as opposed to the physical motion of the electrons themselves. that plays the role in limiting digital logic speed.

Re:How fast?

[imnoteddy]

Electron flow speed has nothing to do with how fast electronic circuits can perform operations

Bzzzt. Wrong. A basic unit of a MOS transister is the transit time of electrons in a gate. This is related to the mobility of the charge carriers (electrons/holes).

To quote "Introduction to VLSI Systems" (Mead/Conway):

"We shall see that the transit time is the fundamental unit of the entire integrated system."

Re:How fast?

[Kulic]

I feel that I should point out a flaw in your argument. You say that the water will be "almost instantly" expelled from the other end. Maybe in a short tube, but the time between you applying pressure on one end and the time water comes out the other end is the time taken for the pressure wave to move throughout the medium (I think this is normally the speed of sound in the medium, although special cases exist).

In short, this does not hold for large systems. Yes, I am a physicist.

Re:How fast?

[Rostin]

Actually, what I think he was trying to say (in what was to me a confusing way) is generally correct.

The reason the lights come on seemingly the same instant you flip the switch is NOT because electrons are going around the circuit that quickly. It's because changes to the electric field in the circuit propogate very quickly. Please see http://www.physlink.com/Education/AskExperts/ae69. cfm

Re:How fast?

[aardvarkjoe]

Electrons dont move through copper at the speed of light. However, they do move faster than sound does through a fluid.

No, they don't. Not by a long shot. (Link to a page that lets you see how the size of the wire and the current changes the drift velocity, but typical speeds are measured in centimeters per hour.) However, you don't actually need to move electrons all the way through the circuit to have a current, so the drift speed of the electrons is not really relevant.

Re:How fast?

[polecat_redux]

Great explanation. Thanks for the clarification.

Re:How fast?

[HeX86]

Well the pressure wave is delayed, not instant. It will be less than the speed of sound under water (something around 800mph). Still a lot slower than electrons.

Re:How fast?

[MillionthMonkey]

The drift velocity for DC current is around a few mm/sec, but the individual root-mean-square electron velocities in a wire are comparable to c. (Regardless of current.) Although they keep scattering off the copper atoms and off each other and change direction all the time, so they don't travel very far. But the signal propagation velocity through a wire depends much more on the rms velocity than the aggregate current drift velocity.

People are generally surprised that drift velocity of electrical current is so slow. When I was in middle school there were two water fountains in the cafeteria, separated by a hundred feet or so. A common trick was to wait until someone was drinking at one fountain, then turn the handle on the other fountain really fast- on/off/on/off/on/off- and they would instantly get sprayed in the face. Even though the bulk of the water itself drifted slowly through the pipes as you drank it, the individual water molecules were bouncing around in all directions at high speeds and the signal conduction through the water between the fountains was very fast.

Re:How fast?

[conan776]

Yes, but I want only of those special ones on late night TV that have Amazing Pulses of Light

Re:How fast?

[spacecowboy420]

Best."Oh, no he di'n".evaar

Re:How fast?

[T-Bills]

I remember from a university physics class that it actually takes an electron about 58 minutes to travel 1m in a solid conductor. Therefore, it is the EM wave propagation (which propagates at the speed of light) which enables signals to be sent much faster.

Re:How fast?

[AlephNot]

"The answer is that in this universe, no such infinitely rigid rod is possible"

No doubt that disappoints a lot of women, who were looking for an "infinitely rigid rod"... *rimshot*

Re:How fast?

[ddimas]

This also implies that fluidic computing will always be slower than electronics, because the fundmental speed is orders of magnitudes slower. Which doesn't mean it is useless, I'm just killing two birds with one stone here, showing why this is no threat to electronics :-)

This looks to be more useful for a fast and accurate "tricorder" device. Looking at it from a chemical point of view you can "preprogram" a whole lot of tests onto this thing and just fly. I for one (having done more than my share of chemical analysis) would love to see this device in a lab. I would save literally years of set up time.

Re:How fast?

[uberdave]

Fluidic circuits would be immune to electromagnetic pulse effects from nuclear blasts.

Whenever I hear of fluidic circuits, I am reminded of Han Solo's Revenge. Han and Chewie had to repair the Millennium Falcon on a planet where fluidic circuitry was the highest tech on the planet.

Re:How fast?

[sjalex]

Interesting post, tell us more? Not being in that business I lack the insight to know how you'd save years of setup time. For that matter, why wouldn't a regular computer do the job?

Cheers,

Stephen

Re:How fast?

[pVoid]

Perhaps this kind of computer could rapidly cycle through all such combinations.

You're completely missing the point. This machine is just a fluid implementation of a binary machine. In that respect, it has absolutely no logical difference from a silicon based digital machine.

I think you might be drawing some sort of paralel between the fact that Quantum computers can do many things in paralel, and the fact that this doesn't use electricity as a means of implementing classical digitial logic.

Quantum computers aren't just a different implementation of digital logic, in fact, there is nothing even remotely similar to the logic circuits you're used to in Q Computing.

If there's anything I can think of, these machines will be completely immune to EM interference. But aside from that, they will be regular computers that could eventually implement a RISC or CISC arch, and run linux or windows binaries.

Re:How fast?

[forkboy]

But electron speeds are still not that close to c. Photons have negligible mass, electrons have measurable mass, albeit small. Electron speeds top out a couple orders of magnitude below c.

But you're definately correct regarding electron drift not being a measure of electron speed.

Re:How fast?

[Mac Degger]

It will make pneumatics cheaper. Instead of large components or electronically driven systems, you can now go to a fully mechanical system to drive yourprneumatic system, which means you don't have to integrate an electronic system into a mechanical one.
How's that for a real-world application?

Re:How fast?

[wass]

it uses the same forces that sound does.

Actually, if you look at the microscopic physics, they both use the same forces. It's primarily electromagnetic forces, although some quantum degeneracy statistics plays a role too, that prevent your hand from going through a door when you knock on it. However, in fluidics (and sound) phonons are being transmitted through the medium, just like photons are transmitted through the wires in electronic systems. However, the sound waves derive mostly from the usually harmonic potentials keeping molecules spaced apart at their average distances. EM waves derive from charges (ie, electrons) moving and reacting with each other.

This also implies that fluidic computing will always be slower than electronics

Practically yes, but to be pedantic - not necessarily always. Maxmimum signal speed in fluidics would by governed by phonons, and in electronics by photons.

In reality the phonon modes, which are usually pretty dispersive (ie propogation speed depends on frequency), have slower propagation speeds than photons (also usually dispersive but usually not as much) in most matter.

But to say 'always' isn't necessarily true, there's no reason a priori to assume in some random material photonic excitations are necessarily faster than phononic excitations.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

are being ultimately effected

"affected".

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Stop saying Bzzzt. It's fucking annoying.

Re:How fast?

[Breakfast Pants]

You completely misinterpreted his post. When he says you can quickly cycle through all combinations he means *actually moving the fluid to physically test all possible combinations*. He wasn't talking about quantum physics. Think DNA computing. Somewhat different than what he was talking about but way more like it than what you were talking about. DNA computing physically tries each combination by using essentially massively parrallel computation.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Better yet, the average drift velocity of electrons in, for example, copper. Electrons bounce around at close to 1/3 * c, but progress in an aggregate manner through the medium at a relatively 'slow' velocity, on the order of mm/sec.

The signal, of course, is propagated much faster.

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

The speed of electron has nothing to do with the speed at which you can switch circuits - except may be in old valve tubes.

Re:How fast?

[SiliconShaman]

The "fluidics" in that story was as a response to EMP vulnerabilities in electronics.

Peace favor your sword

Re:How fast?

[tacocat]

Never mind the speed. You can power your computer from a very small creek.

Think computerized water management systems that can run without the need for infrastructure deployment of electrical and data communication lines.

This, combined with micropower generation would give you remote management techniques.

I think it's pretty darn cool!

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

using the phrase "bzzt wrong" makes you sound arrogant. using that phrase together with the lack of ability to spell what you claim to be informed about (transister -> transistor) makes you sound like a joke (as a person, not your post).

Re:How fast?

[pVoid]

And you made the same mistake as him. The fluids aren't used in some sort of magical way to use massively parallel operations. They are used in logic gates. The absolute same things that are used in digital computers.

Both of your points are completely flawed and irrealistic.

Re:How fast?

[sribe]

For example, say you have a tube filled with water, and you were to apply pressure on one end, almost instantly, water would be expelled from the other end.

This explanation is more than just a correct description of why the microfluidic circuit in question can operate "quickly" compared to the flow rate of the fluid. It's also a pretty good analogy for how traditional electronic circuits operate!

When current flows through a copper wire, the migration speed of electrons is actually pretty low, under a meter per second IIRC. But a single electron being shoved along the line forces others to be shoved, so the effect of electrons injected into one end of the wire is seen nearly instantly at the other end. (Actual propagation speed is very roughly 0.4c.)

Think of the wire as a long pipe filled with ping-pong balls: shove a ball in one end and some other ball drops out the other end pretty quickly. But not quite instantly because the balls are not perfectly rigid, so the combination of compression, inertia and expansion determines how long it takes for the motion to propagate.

Re:How fast?

[Oddly_Drac]

"For the nitpickers who will inevitably respond to that generalization"

Not so much a nitpick as a question; how does quantum entanglement fit into this? Can information be carried in this fashion?

Re:How fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see how such a system would complement silicon. Such a system might be able to put the system-logic on a board near the source, free of electrical noise, and report to a more remote digital interface. Also, the abilit to not have to worry about electrical shorts in a fluid medium would make a fluid-logic system more robust. Deep sea exploration immediately springs to mind.

Re:How fast?

[ddimas]

I recently ran a quantatative titration. The set up time was over 24 hours. The actual titration took 15 minutes.

Re:How fast?

[Tuna_Shooter]

You are the Mercs 2 Forkboy RatBastard ???? if thats you im the SOB Pirate

Re:How fast?

[AngryDill]

A minor correction:

...phonons are being transmitted through the medium, just like photons are transmitted through the wires in electronic systems...

As the wires are opaque to light, it would be electrons (or holes depending on how you look at it) being transmitted through that medium. Alternatively, you could refer to photons passing through a fibre-optic medium.

Re:How fast?

[Detritus]

Visible light is just a small part of the EM spectrum. The fact that a material is opaque to visible light does not mean that it is opaque to photons of other wavelengths.

The photon is also the mediating particle of the electromagnetic force.

Re:How fast?

[Breakfast Pants]

No magic involved. I'm not fucking talking about QM, get it through your head. I'm talking about combining digital logic caused by actual flow of fluid with having solutions of different compounds in the actual fluid. You could therefore use this to do complex logic in mixing operations and basically if you use the equivilant of a multiplexer you could test all possible combinations in parrallel at the same time of x different fluids. You could also do much cooler stuff than this such as getting into the non-combinational circuit realm. DNA computing works by basically trying every possible combination to a problem. It does not make solving NP complete problems doable in P time blah blah blah and I'm not suggesting that fluid computing does either. Get it through your head. I'm (we're) talking about combinining the flow of logic with the actual physical flow of test material.

Re:How fast?

[pVoid]

And get it through your head that these logic gates are designed to function *exactly* like electronic gates.

What you're proposing here is akin to saying, let's have two different voltages simultaneously live on the same CPU... somehow magically multiplexing two operations into one single ALU.

It doesn't work that way. Period.

It's not like this is new logic...

[LostCluster]

Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

Nice joke... but I don't quite understand what "fluid programming" would be compared to normal programming. Changing out the processor might allow things to be done faster, but it's not like these fluid chips will suddenly be able to complete a whole new set of logical operations, the chip technolgy just decides how the ones-and-zeros get stored... it doesn't really have much say in how they're going to be used, that's the programmer and complier's job.

When it comes down to it, every programming language gets reduced to assembly level code in order to actually runs. This is a new way to do binary logic mechanically, but until they get this to the speed of copper chips they're not going to be useful for much. And I just don't see any form of programming revolution happening from this.

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[jcr]

When it comes down to it, every programming language gets reduced to assembly level code in order to actually runs.

Close, but what the hardware executes is machine language, not assembly language.

-jcr

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[NanoGator]

"This is a new way to do binary logic mechanically, but until they get this to the speed of copper chips they're not going to be useful for much."

Would they survive an EM burst?

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[Flexagon]

Yes; the whole point of using abstractions like these (in this case, using a totally new technology to implement well-understood AND, OR, etc.) is to hide the underlying lower-level technology so that everything we already know can be reused on top. While there may be reasons that the whole system might be better or worse for some applications (somebody alluded radiation), once standard gates are available, there's no inherent reason why a fluid computer would need to be programmed any differently from other computers based on the same abstraction. Same old meaning for flowchart, at least above the gates.

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[Short Circuit]

Adds a whole new meaning to "Your blood will boil!"

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Memory is vulnerable, not the CPU.

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[nacturation]

Would they survive an EM burst?

Depends on frequency, intensity, and duration. How long does your cold cup of coffee stay cold when being microwaved on high?

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[Anonymous Coward]

The liquid could very well survive the EM blast, but the motors needed to pump the liquid would still need electricity to run. If you could find a way to power these things without electricity, you could finally have something to over come EM.

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yep, if this thing uses water, a 2.4-ishGHz wave will take it down in short order.

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[WhiteDeath]

How long does your cold cup of coffee stay cold when being microwaved on high?

probably a LOT longer than a CPU....

It is more a matter of having something that can last longer than the pulse you can generate. If it can last say 10 or 100 times longer than a copper chip, it is an advantage - one that anyting that used copper chips might not have.

Experiments that could not be measured close up with electronic circuits could now be measured/observed.

Just imagine if we had computerized war machines that could survive EMP for ten times as long as the opposition's - you could emit an EMP that would take them out and leave you perfectly happy.

--
Imagine a beowulf cl... sorry, this one was just begging for it

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[fyngyrz]

If you could find a way to power these things without electricity, you could finally have something to over come EM.

• Natural pumps: Blood pressure / heart action (I particularly like the idea of a biologically embedded logic system that derives from this)
• Artificial pumps: Bicycles, hand pumps, etc
• Tides
• Gravity flow / evaporative cycle (streams, rivers, etc.)
• Air pressure / flow (flight, thrown objects, dropped objects, stepped-on objects)

Re:It's not like this is new logic...

[jfengel]

Yes, they would survive an EM burst.

I used to work in a fluidics laboratory as an intern [hey, I actually know something for once that every Slashdotter doesn't know!] and one of the purposes they were developing this stuff for was because of its ability to survive an EM burst. They were talking about using it in fighter planes for exactly that reason.

This was two decades ago, I'm ashamed to admit [I mean, I can't believe I've gotten so old that I remember two decades ago], and the things this lab built were way, way larger than the stuff being talked about in the article.

Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[mfh]

Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing?

Not really, because it's basically a copy of the old way except utilizing fluid dynamics. The way electric gates revolutionized electronics was special because there was nothing like it before. What this will do, is enable better redundant designs for deep space probes. Also, a liquid computer likely doesn't get as hot or it won't be as much of a problem if it does.

Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

No, we'll just fill all the systems with coffee and call ourselves The Happy Folk.

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[wickedsun]

Isnt that what CPUs are? a "better" way to implement these gates? Smaller, more efficient.
Altho I doubt this is some kind of great achievement (like the conversion from lamps to transistors), it is neato.

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[deglr6328]

Why would deep space probes use microfluidic logic processors? They may, on the other hand, be very useful for carrying out microchemical analytical techniques with a limited amount of reagent for things like life detection and geochemistry experiments on future planetary(Mars probably) rovers though.

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[necama]

What this will do, is enable better redundant designs for deep space probes.

You might have problems with your fluid freezing in deep space; the background temperature is kinda cold.

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[LiquidCoooled]

Because a modern processor in space would suffer critical data faults due to unwanted radiation exposure.

With silicon designs, the larger gate size of the older processors means it is less susceptable to this kind of inteference. This same principle should hold - radiation should not not effect fluids in the way it tends to effect electron logic.

Now, if this microfluidic principle can be made to work reasonably quickly, then there is reasonable chance that it will overtake silicon as the prefered space certified design. :)

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

there are "fluids" that are liquid at -200 F, like say nitrogen, possibly hydrogen/argon. I'n not sure how well a the system supporting the fluid would react to such cold extremes though

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[ConceptJunkie]

So what kind of fluid would be reasonable to use in space, where it would probably require a heat source just to remain liquid... helium, perhaps?

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[WalletBoy]

No, we'll just fill all the systems with coffee and call ourselves The Happy Folk.

Imagine using that system with coffee to run programs written in Java...

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[Anonymous Coward]

You're being funny, but that is an interesting point. Also, interesting is that liquid Helium behaves in ways that no other liquid does. i.e. it can climb the walls of a container that it is in.

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[idontgno]

Imagine using that system with coffee to run programs written in Java...

That sets up some really confusing "overheard in a geek party" sound bites, like "I wrote a java program. I wrote it in C#."

Re:Redundant Systems and Fluid Dynamics

[ConceptJunkie]

Materials engineering and all the wacky new properties of various compounds they are discovering is one of the most interesting parts of technology today to me.

Between carbon nanotubes, superconducting materials, materials that freeze when they get warmer and Einstein-Bose condensates, etc, etc, it's a fascinating time.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is somehow turned into a serious technology solution. Whooda thinkit?

will...

[mr_burns]

will kevin costner star in a dramatization of the discovery as a bad actor with gills? "WaterLogicWorld".

Re:will...

[MarkMcLeod]

Baaaa-zing!

So in the future

[Camel Pilot]

Will we have computers with a logo that says

"Guinness inside"

Re:So in the future

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope not, it should be the geek infront of the computer that is wearing that logo :)

Re:So in the future

[theparanoidcynic]

We have that now.

* Takes a sharpie and writes "Guinness Inside" on the case of his box and draws an Intel swirl around it. *

Sometimes it pays to have cases salvagd from the trash. I'd like to see you impulsively do something like that neon-tubing, uv-glow, chrome-fan-guard boys . . . . . . . .

Re:So in the future

[Anonymous Coward]

BRILLIANT!

Re:So in the future

[Daagar]

A computer with Guinness inside? BRILLIANT!

Re:So in the future

[tlhIngan]

A computer with Guinness inside? BRILLIANT!

Not really, when you think about it. Say you're at a LAN party, and you get thirsty... do you drink the stuff that makes you able to play, or do you just go thirsty or (shudder), drink water?

Then you'll have these sort of people:

Customer: Helll....o. my com...put...er does-n't work.
Tech Support: Sir, did you drink the fluid in your computer?
Customer: Uh... *hic*

In aviation folklore, the compass (which swings inside a fluid to help prevent inaccuracies) used to be filled with, I think, bourbon. Now, you can see how long that lasted (especially in the military), so they fill 'em up with kerosene instead. Pity the mechanic or pilot who decides to go "inspect" his plane shortly after the change.

What about microscopic steam-based logic gates?

[MillionthMonkey]

That would be totally retro. And it would allow AMD to enter the business.

Re:What about microscopic steam-based logic gates?

[harrkev]

Yup! Moore's law gets to live on - just in fluids instead of silicon. Cool.

And now that fancy water-cooling system in your box can also power your processor. Yeah!

But overclockers will then need larger and larger pumps. It's all fun and games untill some kid pokes his eye out hooking up a pressure washer pump to his computer.

Re:What about microscopic steam-based logic gates?

[Behrooz]

Replace 'eye' with 'brain', and you could have the scientific accident which results in the creation of a new superhero... "THE BRAIN"

Ever seen the inside of an automatic transmission?

[drinkypoo]

Go check out some pictures of one sometime, and check out the part that looks like a maze... and prepare to be amazed. This is only new technology because it's been miniaturized.

Oh good lord....

[Malek the Damned]

Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

Worst. Pun. Ever.

Re:Oh good lord....

[Timber_Z]

Worst Quote Ever!
Think I'll go to the Comic Store...

Re:Oh good lord....

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're going to use that cliche, get it right:

Worst. Pun. Evar.

Old logic, new gates

[k_yarina]

Fluidics has been around for a long time.. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fluidic_logic

Re:Old logic, new gates

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks a lot - I knew I had read about this about 10 years ago in an encyclopedia that was probably 20 years old at the time. So what's new?

In Eastern Germany

[retostamm]

in the 1970's there was a lot of research on Pneumatic Computing. I read a book about that a while back (can't remember the title).

Essentially it worked the same way, plus they had a little "Transistor" where a big airstream would be disturbed if a small control airstream is on.

Obvious advantages of that technology:
- You only need to be able to cut sheetmetal and weld it together
- Not affected by X-Rays unless you melt it (think MAD/Nukes)
- Probably no cooling problems (not sure about this)

Of course, it'd be also very slow. And big.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[NanoGator]

" - Not affected by X-Rays unless you melt it (think MAD/Nukes)"

Kinda curious what Nasa would think of that. They're not a big fan of radiation causing random bits on a chip to get flipped.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[MrTwist]

I remember reading about this back in the day as a way to EMP proof computing systems. I'm sure there's a need for it somewhere. ICBM logic perhaps?

Re:In Eastern Germany

[crmartin]

You're thinking of "fluidics". Was a big deal for about 20 minutes.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[crmartin]

It's even on Wikipedia.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[Mulletproof]

- Not affected by X-Rays unless you melt it (think MAD/Nukes)

Something is still going to have to power those micro fluidic pumps. And your display. And the keyboard. AND your hard drive. Disrupt any one of those systems or the PSU and your fluidic chip is useless.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[Jahf]

- Not affected by X-Rays unless you melt it (think MAD/Nukes)

Yeah, but a well focused microwave could boil your CPU (or if not boil due to removal of gases in the liquid, at the least pressurize it to an extreme).

Nothing is truly failsafe.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[Rostin]

Yeah, I know. I'm posting this like a day later, but maybe someone will find it interesting. Back in the "good ole days" of the chemical industry (in excess of 50 years ago), PID controllers (for temperature control loops, for example) were implemented entirely (or almost entirely) pneumatically. It's not the same thing, because it isn't digital, but I've always been fascinated by it, just the same.

Re:In Eastern Germany

[Anonymous Coward]

This has been around in industrial control for ages. I remember pneumatic "logic" on offshore oil platforms in the 1970s. Noisy, slow, ultra-reliable... perfect for very harsh environments.

All things old are new again? :-)

chemistry and computing?

[k98sven]

Will this advance revolutionize chemistry and computing the way electric gates revolutionized electronics and computing?

I'm not sure if this is a typo.. but I see no real use for this in computing.. unless you want computers which (at best) work like conventional ones except much, much, much, slower.

However, in chemistry.. it may very well become a big thing. One possible use I can think of is for building automated little microlaboratories, controlling the mixage and flow of different chemicals.

This, in general, is a hot research topic in chemistry.. Already in biotech a lot of things similar to this are being put to practical use (Chip assays is an example).

Basically, it's the revolution of miniaturization which is (finally..) coming to chemistry.

Re:chemistry and computing?

[k98sven]

Actually.. To respond to my own post with a little elaboration:

You could be possible to build a micro-lab which tests for something by mixing a sample fluid with different reagents and combining that with some 'fluid-logic' in order to determine the result.

Besides research, I could imagine good practical use for this kind of technology in forensics.

Obviously, a small, cheap and easy-to-use (maybe even disposable) test which could be done directly at a crime scene could be very important in catching criminals.

Advanced? This is 50's technologies

[nurb432]

The application of fluidics has been around for ages.. even before tubes and 'electronic logic' we had fluidics.. both analog and digital.

Sure its still cool, but dont call it 'advanced'..

Geesh..

Re:Advanced? This is 50's technologies

[Jeff DeMaagd]

The advanced part is its miniaturization. There's probably a technical reason why it wasn't done this small before.

As one might consider a 90nm process CPU to be more advanced than the 130nm process CPU of the same core. It should be able to do more with less current, and also go up to higher frequencies.

Sounds great but...

[lakcaj]

Of course I didn't RTFA, but what happens if:

1. The device is not level or turned on its side?
2. The device is accelerated?

It would seem to me that a device that uses fluid dynamics might be subject to the effects of gravity/acceleration... hardly suitable for the control system in a fighter jet for example :)

Re:Sounds great but...

[k98sven]

The width of these channels is 100 micrometers.

The flows here are created by the capillary forces which dominate at that size.

No gravity required.

Could be useful in some harsh environments

[erichill]

It seems that like mechanical microdevices, fluid devices could be resistant to such things as high radiation environments. Sometimes survivability is more important than speed. While I don't have a reference handy, it seems to me that fluid devices might even have an advantage over mechanical devices when mechanical shock resistance is important. While it may interrupt operations, the device wouldn't have any small gears to break off. I'd be interested in hearing about the vulnerabilities of these devices.

Frozen hack...

[sarcastro73]

Whoever thought that supercooling a processor would completely prevent ANDing two bits?

This just in...

[fiannaFailMan]

Adding machine invented that uses gears, chains and pulleys to add two numbers together.

And no, I didn't RTFA, but I agree with other comments that this fluid stuff sounds like a very cool hack and may have some practical application somewhere.

"Memory leak" will now have a double meaning

[Anonymous Coward]

and you'd probably have to heat up the processor to overclock it, at least if fluid viscosity is related to temperature.

Don't..

[FiReaNGeL]

Don't think we'll have fluids computers someday... electron > H20. Instead, I think that such things could be used in microfluidics chips(yeah I know, kinda obvious), especially in biotechnology-related applications. Pretty cool progress is made in this field... someday, we may have a 'lab-on-a-chip' to diagnose a bunch of diseases with a drop of blood, or analyse samples quickly (mission to Mars?).

Teaching tool?

[supz]

Couldn't this be used as a great tool for teaching? You should show people exactly what is happening inside a processor. It's always so difficult to get people to picture something they cannot see, and this would make a great visual example

Re:Teaching tool?

[supz]

Whoops... you *could* show people exactly what is happening inside the processor. :D

XOR

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, a dumb question. It's been a few years since I took a logic course. I know what all the others are but would someone mind telling me what XOR is?

Re:XOR

[Anonymous Coward]

It stands for "eXclusive OR" -- it is either one thing or another, but not both. In other words, if either input (but not both) is on, the circuit is on.

The logic gate is:
[0 0] 0
[0 1] 1
[1 0] 1
[1 1] 0

Re:XOR

[Anonymous Coward]

You can also form an XOR operation with AND's, OR's and NOT's.

A XOR B = (A AND [NOT B]) OR (B AND [NOT A])

Re:XOR

[mlheur]

Yeah, and if you read their defn's in TFA they have OR & XOR switched.

How would you cool such computing devices?

[deragon]

How would you cool such computing devices? Surround the tubes with coils and have electricity flowing through them? ;)

Re:How would you cool such computing devices?

[Stevyn]

Well, yeah ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peltier-Seebeck_effec t

Cool Running

[overshoot]

Hate to break the news, but unless someone finds a way to use superfluids (lossless flow fluids, like liquid helium) for these, they're gonna take power to run.

At a rough guess from scaling theory, they're gonna take several orders of magnitude more energy/bit than electronic gates.

Fluid gates fast enough?

[NathanE]

I really don't see fluid gates becoming anywhere near fast enough to compete with electronic ones. I would think that pushing fluid through millions of tiny "pipes" would tend to be loud too (anybody have any info on this?). Who knows though ... maybe I'm just not creative enough. :)

Galloping gnards! A water-powered computer?

[the_quark]

Hey, it's the water powered computer from the Crunchly saga! The future is finally here!

There are many subsequent panels in this story line, if you follow the links at the bottom of the Jargon entries...

uh....

[WindowLicker916]

HAHAH HE SAID FLOWCHART!! get it??? water??? water flows???? FLOW CHART!! HOW DOES HE DO IT?!?!?!? *cough*

Debugging

[LegoEvan]

Not only might you have to actually de-bug the damn thing, imagine the consequence of poor programming.

Talk about your memory leaks!

Reasons for Fluidics

[nurb432]

One quick reason for using fluidics is they are not susceptible to magnetic radiation.. such as from an emp bomb..

They are also really useful in direct control of fluids..

There are many others of course, but those 2 come to mind.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

There are still some bugs in the water gates...

[hpa]

Okay, this definitely calls for a link to... Crunchly!

Mandatory reading for the larval geek...

Fluid computer in Cold War?

[isdale]

I recall there was a ballistics computer built back during the cold war. The idea was that it was immune to radiation effects (EMPulse). I cant find a reference to it in a quick web search.

their XOR looks busted

[Anonymous Coward]

In the photo, 0 ^ 0 is 1... they need some work...

Re:their XOR looks busted

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Its hard to tell. It does look like some fluid is going in that tube. It might not be enough to qualify as a 1.

reminds me of something ESR pointed out to me...

[wed128]

check this out...liquid computing...http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/G /glitch.html#crunchly73-06-04

Corning fluidics (from about 1972)

[klubar]

Many years ago (about 1972), Corning and others made "fluidics" devices that used air to implement simple nand gates. They were looking for applications, such as explosive environments (fireworks factories, cotton processing) that relays wouldn't work well in. The devices had simple sensors and could implement logic by combining nand gates. There were a couple of competitors that made fluidic devices. The Corning were small black cans about 2" high and 1/2 around; the air supply was connected on the top and there were 4-inputs and one output on the bottom.

Cute, but they went no where. I put together a neat high school science fair project with them and got to the county level.

Nice to see the concept recycled.

Re:Corning fluidics (from about 1972)

[Anonymous Coward]

Pneumatic-action pipe organs, in which the signals from the manuals and stop rails are combined by air logic, go back to the early 1900s. I tore one apart for its scrap metal content once, whilst working for a pipe organ rebuilder; the console had at least two hundred pounds of lead tubes in it. These were popular alternatives to mechanical (tracker) organs, before electric logic got cheap and reliable enough.

Re:Ever seen the inside of an automatic transmissi

[LiquidCoooled]

Here you go folks, I found a decent picture.

Hes right you know, it looks similar.

http://auto.howstuffworks.com/automatic-transmissi on10.htm

No fp!

[Anonymous Coward]

No frist prost!

DNA pharma uses

[cinnamon colbert]

uhh..the thing about pharma or biotech apps, is that they require a lot of DIFFERENT liquids..this may not sound like much, but in practice simply keeping the solutions dust free is hard.. I don't quite see an app for this, but maybe i am dense also, this principle of controlled non turbulent mixing of fluid streams in microchannels has been demonstrated, at least 6 years ago by a company developing a T sensor; point is, anyone could have done this in the last 8 years, so hats off to colorado if they r smart enuf to understand why u shd

...new meaning to "flowchart"?

[potus98]

Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

Well, it'll certainly give new meaning to piss poor code.

And instead of bugs in our code, will we have proterozoins? "Gee, that's some pretty proterozoiny code ya got there."

Zounds

[omarius]

Certinly puts a new spin on 'memory leak.'

So, we have come full circle

[karlandtanya]

Back to fluidics...
You can find fluid control systems (typically pneumatic) in explosion hazard areas.
Not new. Just smaller.

chemistry and computing?-Donkey Kong Lab.

[Anonymous Coward]

Combine fluidics with MEMs and other developments in chemistry. One could concivably have a portable crime lab the size of a gameboy advance.

Combine with plastics and you have something

[mike_lynn]

Currently, people who have assistive devices like pacemakers are unable to do certain things (like stand near a high power magnet). With this type of device and plastic composites, you could drastically reduce the amount of metal in surgically implanted devices.

Hopefully they won't leak like the breast implants.

I swim the body fluidic.

[Doc Ruby]

That could depend on the operations. In the electronic paradigm, fast CPUs process data in parallel, integrated across much slower networks, their messages processed by routers on a much higher symbolic level than processed in the CPUs. A possible fluidics architecture might process chemical reactions which code their results in their products, which are flags for the fluidic processor valve. So networks of partial results can be processed by these CPUs. There are many computational chemistry applications which could be complementary to this kind of processor, with fluids merely the medium which they chemistry conveniently produces, and these chips are suited to process. There's nothing uniquely informational about electrons; they're just the tiny tool we had mastered when we started applying the mechanics of info theory. Now we can harness our latent fluidics techniques, crossbred with our electronic techniques, for a hybrid that can use the most tractable properties of both.

Additionally, humans are more chemical than electronic. Even our neurology, often metaphorically "electric", is really an ion pump. All electronics require lots of adapters to couple with our senses, either chemical, optical or mechanical (including sound). These fluidics are in the same domain as our own primary physical existence. So integrating them with our biology might be more direct. Implants, sensors, medicine, all the much more personal tech applications might be more available to microfluidics than they've been to alien electronics. Surf's up!

Old technology new package.

[Anonymous Coward]

The only new thing that I see here is the fact that they shrunk the size of fludic logic. In the 60s and 70s there were many control systems built using air powered fludic logic. Today, most of these designs would be implemented using embedded microprocessors or programmable logic controllers. The big draw backs to fludic design were size and the need for clean dry compressed air. The circuits were easy to build, change and maintain. They also were reliable and immune to ESD.

microfluid logic basic research

[ThomasMis]

If anyone wants more in-depth information about microfluid logic, they can read the research work from Toshinori Munakata at Cleveland State University with the Colorado School of Mines researchers: Flow resistance for microfluidic logic operations

Flow Chart? How about liquid cooling...

[lullabud]

That's a pretty complex flow chart, if you ask me, but I suppose the logic is all the same. My first thought was more along the lines that the cpu could cool itself in the very act of computing. Neat idea. :) If only we could teach electricity to cool itself, since it's incredibly doubtful that fluidic cpu's are going to be giving us an extra edge.

Re:Ever seen the inside of an automatic transmissi

[Anonymous Coward]

this is so far off the subject. The complexity of the fluidic system in an automatic transmission has nothing to do with the a fluidic logic circuit. The day shifting gears makes your car 'think' call me

Backup computer for dynamically unstable aircraft?

[steveha]

Modern fighter aircraft are dynamically unstable, and cannot be flown with simple mechanical controls; you need a flight computer and a "fly-by-wire" system.

So, in theory, an electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) could make a fighter airplane crash by knocking out the computer that keeps it stable in the air.

The F-16 is one of these dynamically unstable aircraft. I thought I had read, years ago, that the F-16 has a fluidic backup computer that is smart enough to keep it flying if the main computer goes down. However, I have been Googling, trying to find a web page to back up this memory, and I haven't found anything. Maybe my memory is wrong.

Whether it has already been done or not, this seems like something the military would be interested in.

steveha

Microfluidic memory

[Anonymous Coward]

This is cool: http://thebigone.caltech.edu/quake/publications/sc ienceoct02.pdf.

Gee, whiz computing?

[gone.fishing]

Someone had to say it, may as well be me!

Hydraulic Propagation Delay?

[TFGeditor]

One factor affecting speed of logic devices is propagation delay.

For argument's sake, let's assume we have a hypodermic syringe filled with fluid attached to a lo-ong needle (100 miles) or other tube. The needle/tube is already filled with fluid.

Parallel to it, we have a wire or other conductor.

If we plunge the syringe and simultaneously inject a current into the wire, at the other end, which occurs first: movement of the fluid, or electron flow?

Assuming the fluid is water, I seem to recall that you cannot compress water, ergo no loss to compression, hence no propagation delay. Would not the hydraulic model then react faster?

Re:Hydraulic Propagation Delay?

[Bagels]

No, hydraulics are not going to let you escape the bounds of relativity. Sorry. (additionally, friction means that the water/fluid molecules would be nowhere near as fast moving as the electrons, and water can in fact be compressed a tiny bit).

Re:Hydraulic Propagation Delay?

[OwlofCreamCheese]

no dude, speed of sound... not beyond speed of light.

no applause, just throw money

[Doc Ruby]

Thanks, I'm here all week. I've got a million of 'em - counting that one, a million and one. Notice how my fingers never leave my hand...

Half addition?

[Anonymous Coward]

The researchers have also combined a pair of gates into a half adder, which carries out half the operation of addition

Not sure how useful a fluid computer is that adds 1 + 1 and gets 1.5...

Reminds me of a project I saw awhile ago...

[goodchef]

Reminds me of something I saw a year or two ago. A guy at the MIT Media Lab created AND and XOR gates using water pressure. By using those in combinations, you could derive the other basic gates you needed.

Of course, it had the problems that your circuits had to be arranged vertically, and you couldn't have sequential circuits. But it wasn't intended for serious use, but as a teaching tool to help people understand binary logic.

http://web.media.mit.edu/~paulo/courses/howmake/ml fabfinalproject.htm

Parent has the right idea.

[Ghostgate]

For those who RTFA, you will see this research was funded by NASA and NSF. There's a reason for that. Seriously, this being Slashdot and all, I was surprised at how many people immediately dismissed this as "too slow". Eventually, when perfected, this could be very useful in space. Not just for redundancy, but in other ways as well, like decreasing a system's vulnerability to radiation in space.

Re: This is 50's technologies ... Not really

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fluid.power.net/techbriefs/hanghzau/4_33.pd f
This system operates on a different principle. I'm not convinced that it is any more likely to produce useful applications though. On the other hand, when I look at the mess of pneumatic and hydraulic tubes that comprise automated factory production, I wonder if something like this might not have a place. Anything that is immune from electrical noise and which doesn't create its own noise is sure to be welcome.

Obligatory joke

[PolyDwarf]

Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these things... oh wait...

Re:Practical Use?

[Anonymous Coward]

no! electrons move really slow in a circuit..

the thing moving fast is the "pressure" of the electric circuit.

Similar

In water this is the same as the speed of sound (dont remember speed in water at the moment, but its like 4 times the speed in air.)

Fluidic state machine: automatic transmissions

[MasterC]

Using fluid for logic isn't new. The best example I can think of is the automatic transmission. The valve body is a maze of pathways that essentially act as a state machine of the transmissions that chooses the appropriate bands and gears and such.

One link I found (go down to "Valve Body"):

http://www.familycar.com/transmission.htm

The modern processor is an electrical state machine and the valve body is a fluidic state machine.

The only real development is the physical implementation of the logic but considering that currently they can't link gates it's not of that much practical use since you can't form a state machine (or anything more complex than a gate)...at least I'm not aware of a way to make one layer of logic a state machine...

Cool nonetheless.

Uh, minor nit.

[chadjg]

Uhh, according to some random website

The compressibility of water is .0000034 lb/ft2. For a change in pressure of one pound per square inch, water is only compressed by about 3 one-millionths of its original volume.

However, at very large volumes, this small compression can become significant. For example, if water were truly incompressable, the oceans would stand about 100 feet higher than they do today. Compression of water in the ocean basins reduces global sea level by 100 feet.

I know the macro and micro worlds are quite different, but water does compress, and pipes and hoses do stretch, therefore there must be some delay in the propagation of the pressure wave, right?

Speaking from some minor experience with fire hoses and associated equipment, slamming valves on and off with a relatively incompressible fluid raises holy hell with fittings, pumps and hoses. It's called a "water hammer," and the effects can be costly. I'm not quite sure if this would be a problem in a microsopic array.

Re:Uh, minor nit.

[chadjg]

The site referenced in my comment above also says

Water and other liquids are normally considered incompressable. How else could hydraulic systems function? For all practical purposes at small volumes water can be considered incompressable.

Just to keep it real, you're basically right about water's properties and I have no freakin' idea how to do the math on the page.

Im amazed how....

[Creepy Crawler]

Dumb people here are....

First off, electronics can be made EMP-proof, and a few ways at that.

1: Surround COMPLETELY the device with shielding, ala TEMPEST. Ground the shielding.

2: Use EMP detecters around the object to detect incoming pulse. When slight spike is recorded, cut electricity and ground the chips. These "hardened" chips have a cutoff which crucial parts are grounded/ungrounded on accepting a signal.

3: Use electron tubes for the base part of the system. Connect e-tubes to tempest surrounded internal computer. Use self-grounding chips for best survivalibility.

Re:Im amazed how....

[aXis100]

1: Surround COMPLETELY the device with shielding, ala TEMPEST. Ground the shielding.

Gee...that's *really* simple when you have i/o to deal with.

Yes, you can have isolation, but it's not perfect and still vulnerable to damage. Your controller might survive, but i/o might be destroyed, yay!

Re:Im amazed how....

[Creepy Crawler]

In case of I/O, you can use a type of inductive tap with ferrite sheilding rings to disperse EMP.

Or better yet, you can have analog inputs coming from tube acquisition units. Just purchase adc's (or better yet, chips with adc's) and do same shielding.

If you know any, this is the kind of "stuff" that the NSA, raytheon, and such groups do. Many spy/military sattelites we have in orbit use these same principles. If an EMP-capacitor bomb went off (or thermonuclear, they create emp too), many things would get disabled.. but the GovSats wouldnt. The sensors would detect a emp shift, ground the sattelite for minute, then automatically reengage.

Oh no

[Anonymous Coward]

my computer evaporated.

Fluidic Chips Underrated??

[Mulletproof]

In the end you're still using electricity to power micro-fluidic pumps I'd imagine, but power consumption's gotta be way lower, not to mention thermal buildup. Not sure how they would compare in speed to their conventional brothers, but if the above facts are true, I'm seeing excellent applications for them in portable computing. You could have a device with considerable endurance, substancially less heat build up, and overall less wieght since you don't nessisarily need chunks of metal to bleed off heat (then again, maybe you will; we're talking MIPS here). Finally, they'd be more durable if they're more or less electrically nuetral. If they don't build up heat you could probably lick one while it was running and be ok (speculation of course)

At first I was thinking 'big deal, fluid chips', but given a little more thought there's TONS of applications, even if they aren't quite as fast.

Cellular fluid dynamics + AI Nueron firing

[aLe-ph-1(sh)]

I think I could see this being used in the future with cell's. Carry over genetics and crossbreed with dynamic XOR-XAND type commands, fuzzy machine language to me right now, but wow....

Transmissions...

[mercuryresearch]

Not quite "micro" fluidics, but automatic transmissions have genuine fluid logic. If you've ever seen the inside of the control area, it even looks like a PCB/Chip layout.

So this stuff does get used in real life, only it's much bigger. Of course the total gate complexity is in the single digits, however.

this is not new, done in the pre-transistor era

[Anonymous Coward]

fluidic logic is not new at all. its been done for ages. tesla played with fluid circuits.

Man!

[JoeCommodore]

I'd really to hate to clean up any core dump it leaves on the carpet!

one word

[nusratt]

nano-therapeutics

so we could recreate that section in diamond age?

[Mike Bridge]

i always liked that section in diamond age with the fluid binary system.

Fluid Logic Chips as EMP proof systems

[magarity]

In one of Brian Daley's Han Solo novels, the MF was outfitted in 'fluidic circuits' because Han and Chewie were down on their finances and that was the only thing they could afford. It was supposedly developed because it is EMP proof. This would have been an incredible development during the nuclear standoff cold war. In modern day when the threat of nukes is a much more limited scale this is still an interesting possibility for some kinds of backup or weapons systems.

Re:Fluid Logic Chips as EMP proof systems

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

I knew I had heard the term 'fluidic circuitry' somewhere before.

USB-powered realtime blood/DNA/liquid analsys

[NynexNinja]

What would be nice is a USB powered device that takes a drop of fluid as input and then feeds data back to software that takes the data from the USB and performs analsys on it.

The potential for a device like this is huge. Entire industries could be built around a device like that. Software that in realtime could determine the chemistry of a small sample of blood or other liquid would be an enormous benefit to society.

Re:USB-powered realtime blood/DNA/liquid analsys

[bhima]

There are machines that do all of these things already ( I develop them).

While the actual sensors are quite small, all of the things required to support these sensors wind up being quite large. Reagents to calibrate and wash the sensor. A complete fluidics system (Tubing, Valves &tc.) to move these reagents (and the sample) around. Then you need a micro controller to control all of these and provide a UI to the user. So you wind up with something that can range from 4 times the size of a laptop all the way to something about the size of a station wagon.

There are some single sensor applications that come close to what you describe that work by wicking the sample up on filter paper which contains antibodies and enzymes which reacts to what ever you're looking for (Think home pregnancy and blood glucose tests) but such devices are fairly limited and using a computer to read them is overkill.

Re:Backup computer for dynamically unstable aircra

[Anonymous Coward]

Googling didn't turn up much on fluidic aircraft computers for me either, except this about F-18s and this about B-52s, and this reference:

Cycon, M.F., Jr., "Dual Input Actuator for Fluidic Backup Flight Control", WA-8B, AICE Joint Automatic Control Conference, Vol. 1, Charlottesville, VA, June 17-19, 1981

This reminds me...

[jcr]

Many years ago, I saw an article in Scientific American about how to implement rope logic. I think it was A. K. Dewdney's column.

He showed how all of the standard logic gates could be implemented with ropes and pulleys. Very cool.

-jcr

Does this mean...

[bsdbigot]

... we'll have to implement a physical bit-bucket, and empty it periodically?

... we can finally settle the Beer Wars by feeding streams of bubbly as input?

... on a more serious note, could this technology potentially be used to provide a 100% alcohol-free beer/wine, as opposed to the 99.9% or so achieved now through freezing?

I see in the future a top-ten contest for the most interesting use of the forthcoming fluid logic processor. Also, enterprising youths may wish to go hit USPTO and NetSol now to register all the potential names (WaterGate comes to mind, but that may already be taken :).

"The logic gates can't be linked"

[Anonymous Coward]

"The proof-of-principle devices have two shortcomings: switching inputs between 1 and 0 requires manually pinching off channels, and, because inputs use presence and absence of flow while outputs use two types of fluids, the logic gates can't be linked"

And I was getting excited.

flow in, color out
guess they could add some radiative ehat source
to convert color back to mechanical activity...

electrons move very slowly but their potential
cam move at C. kind of like my thoughts...

Fluidic Space?

[feepness]

Are these particularly effective in Fluidic space?

And if you wanted to be cool as hell...

[Mulletproof]

I know, appending to my own post, but how cool would it be to engineer a conductive system into the same chip? Make the liquid electrically conductive and have both systems running in parallel to one another. One ouwld have to solve the problem of electricity running the same path as the the current fluidic path (thus essentially duplicating the instruction), but if it could be done...

Another obligatory water-related joke...

[Ocelot Wreak]

Aaaand, the entire machine would use FLOATING POINT operations, so it would do real well on the standard benchmarks!

On the other hand, if each operation had a point that really floated, then turning the machine upside down would cause an overflow operation and possibly core dump the points onto your desktop, which I suppose would be fine if you were using an "aquarium" screensaver.

Regards,
-Ocelot Wreak

Cartoon?

[SpacePunk]

Ok, I know I seen this in a cartoon somewhere.

We already know the future.

[jd]

Fluid links are extensively used by the Time Lords as an essential component in the TARDIS flight controls.

The only reason we have Fluid logic chips today is that The Doctor defected from UNIT after the BBC cancelled the series, selling his advanced knowledge on the subject to these researchers.

Basic logic

[manual_overide]

from TFA: An OR gate returns a 1 if either of two inputs is 1. An XOR gate returns a 1 if either or both inputs are 1.

um... XOR is 1 if either inputs are 1, but 0 if they are both 1. If they think they built a half adder with what is actually an OR gate, they need to back to 1st year discrete math. Hint: a half adder is an XOR gate and an AND gate.

Also, if they built a half adder, a full adder shouldn't be too hard, just another half adder and an OR gate...

Ob Rollerball Reference

[Allen Akin]

We've just lost the entire thirteenth century. Still, nothing much there apart from Dante and a few corrupt popes.

Mercury

[vegasbright]

THis reminds me of a logic construct made of mercury that would hold memory in shock waves created in a tube of mercury. One end to create the waves, another to detect them.

One new feature.

[fireboy1919]

One application often discussed with liquid computers is the ease of doing analog computing.

You could, for example, make a fuzzy neural network where "flow" was the feedback generated by checking conductivity, amplifying it and feeding it into a pump. For particularly massive networks, this may be faster than the digital equivalent.

This is an old idea. I myself heard about it in 1998, but they were having problems getting the liquid to hold it's state during delays (and trouble initializing it too, I believe).

Richard Feynman

[TrebleJunkie]

My brain could be farting here, but didn't Richard Feynman mention fluid-based logic gates way back when in a lecture somewhere?

T2!!

[Ba3r]

am I the only one who thought 'now they can finally build the liquid metal terminator!'

probably, but still.. that would be neato

and you forgot to mention...

[jannesha]

don't forget the built-in cooling feature!

[no subject]

[codergeek42]

Will 'fluid programmers' give new meaning to "flowchart"?"

No.

Re:Ever seen the inside of an automatic transmissi

[drinkypoo]

The day a computer 'thinks' call me. Nonetheless logic is implemented fluidically inside an automatic transmission. Even when CPUs can 'think', a single logic gate still won't be able to.

Overclocker's Nightmare!

[rts008]

Use coffee as fluid?

Running on PRON?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this mean I can power a computer using alt.eroticia.binaries.pictures....

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[account_deleted]

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[account_deleted]

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military aircraft flight computer

[Anonymous Coward]

modern military aircraft are inheritantly unstable- they can't be flown manually. you must have a computer to convert joystick commands to control surface movements. that computer must be radiation hardened, and that is heavy. replacing a hardened electronic computer the size of an apartment fridge and weighing sixty pounds with something the size and weight of a sigarette lighter is serious. the reaction time for that computer is only miliseconds so this should work fine.

Clock?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps I'm missing something...
How exactly would you apply a clock to this?

go with the flow

[Doc Ruby]

That's the magic of paradigm shift: the new application is always seen in light of the old problems to solve, until it is applied to new problems. That's where we get proclaimations of "I forsee a world market for maybe 5 computers", and "640K of memory ought to be enough for anybody". Electronic CPUs (CISCs/RISCs at least) have linearized innovation to a race for clock speed, due to their inherent linearity. The real game now is in massive parallelism, like FPGAs and networked compute servers. And what microfluidics lack in speed (though that remains to be seen, at their frictionless micro/nano scales) the gain in their border on the domain of computational chemistry.

Some quantitative progress, especially in scale, leads to qualitative leaps. For example, DNA might be synthesized in reactors fed by fluid logic, then recombined in an onchip microreactor, with periodic PCR amplification and enzymatic selection in the spin cycles. The fluidic logic could work self-referentially to partial results, exercising boolean constraints on evolved populations of massively parallel combinatorics. Then an output phase could execute more logic on the final DNA population, sequencing the results chemically among the products, within the microchannels. DNA MEMs at edge terminals could actually trigger transistors which deliver data to traditional electronic computers. Even if the fluidic reactions execute at KHz clock rates, compared to the hours/days sequencing in mesoscopic labs the processing offers hyperrealtime results, compared to straight electronic computers. This "lab on a chip" talk is as hard to imagine in its ultimate forms as would have been the mobile phone network to Edison's labworkers. But we can stay up late and try our best to spin the visions.

Missing the point, perhaps?

[Skinwalker]

As someone who does academic research in microfluidics, I should probably comment on this and some of the perceptions of it.

This stuff will not WILL NOT ever replace electronic circuitry. I don't think anyone who works with microfluidic applications would seriously claim this. There is just too large of a speed differential between fluids and semiconductors. Do you want your computer making decisions on the millisecond time scale (fluidics) or the subnanosecond time scale (silicon)? This work is a little misguided, and somewhat misleading as it tries to mimic electronic circuitry. Fluidic logic was rightly given up as a techy-backwater thirty years ago. There is tremendous potential in this field, however, when people start to think out of the box of usual engineering.

There are some really cool fluid physics that take over at these length scales. You can't have turbulence (the Reynold's number is far too low) so neighboring streams are totally laminar, and stay separate until they mix by slow diffusion. Buoyant forces dominate over convective forces (the Grashoff number is low), so you can do biology and chemistry experiments in these systems that were previously only practical in microgravity. For a tiny fraction of the cost, mind you... most microfluidicists use a channel-making process that employs photolithography, so you can use the economy of scale to do a f^Hckton of experiments for pennies on the dollar. Better than hoping your precious bugs survive the next shuttle flight.

This stuff is already having a serious impact in biotech and big pharma. The Human Genome Project wouldn't have been possible without technology that used these physics to shunt little packets of fluid around. Synthetic chemists use it to make thousands of variations on whatever drug they're working on.

Do some googling if you're interested... the field is booming right now.

Oh, and these guys are almost certainly using computers to drive their input pumps. Cheating, sorta...

Wait till it freezes...

[thrill12]

I mean, isn't a liquid much more cornered into a very narrow temperature-band than solid material ?

ummm..

[AntiTuX]

what if someone shakes it up?

this is VERY old...

[Anonymous Coward]

I read about that fluidics (that is what it's called) stuff in a German 1960's popular science book "Das Neue Universum". They couldn't think of a killer application then and they probably can't this time. Then, there was some speculation to use it in devices handling fluid anyway to reduce complexity / simplify the design or to reduce the possibility of spark production in environments susceptible to explosion. It is slower, bigger, more expensive and less reliable than electronic control logic so why use it?
(I could think of some usefulness in self-regulating chemical microreactors, though)
Bottom line: The technology is 40 years old and still mostly useless. Nothing to see here, move on...

Ground a satellite ..

[RedLaggedTeut]

Somehow I cannot imagine how you would "ground" a satellite.

I guess you could "ground" the satellite to its own chassis or a battery, but would that be a big enough electron sink? Satellites are made to be small.

I imagine it wouldn't work if the EMP was on the Earth right below it.

How is this practical

[Old Wolf]

How is this, in any way, better than electricity doing the same thing?

The only thing that comes to my mind is that you can 'push' the fluids along with something more practical than a battery (currently, a limitation on micro-electronic devices is the large size needed for electric batteries).

Invented?

[Anne Thwacks]

There is a billion tons of prior art on this one - the fluidic logic predates the discovery of electricity and is still widely used in (for example) bottling plants throughout the known world (can you say "Coca Cola"). Its a safe bet its even used on the planet Zog.

In fact, the regulator in your domestic/bottle gas supply is an example of a fluidic zener diode and transistor.

Fortunately if SCO had a patent on this, it would have expired even before silent movies were invented.

These researchers, and the whole of Colarado for all I know, is about 300 years behind the rest of the planet.

And when the water evaporates....

[Anonymous Coward]

Then what???
Will we be in a perpetual state of 1 or 0?

fluidics

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, guys, this stuff (fluidic gates) has been used
commercially at least in the life support business.

I remember setting up a Mohaghan life support ventilator years ago for use next to a MRI machine because it was the only life support ventilator that did not use electricity & had no magnetic components, hence it was the only machine of it's type that could be used in close proximity to a powered up MRI machine.

Here's a quick spec sheet on the Monaghan vent.

Monaghan 225:

The Monaghan 225 is a pneumatically powered, fluidically controlled, volume limited ventilator. It offers Control, Assist/Control and SIMV with breath rates up to 25 per minute (not at all tidal volumes). It is to be used for patients requiring mechanical ventilation while undergoing magnetic resonance imaging. It is the ONLY ventilator to be used in the MRI center as this ventilation has been specially constructed of non-magnetic materials and will not affect the imaging process nor interact with the magnet. The Monaghan may also be used in the hyperbaric chamber.

I have been using this fluid logic for years...

[Linker3000]

((Ice_cube AND Ice_cube) OR (Can_in_freezer_for_15_mins)) and NOT (Sugar) = Cold _diet_Coke

Hmm - note that it's also EMP proof..

[Anonymous Coward]

It might also be an idea for simple EMP proof systems as long as you have something to provide the 'driving' forces. I would presume you'd rather have a slow system for essentials than no system at all.

Thanks for your comments, I will have a look. Always interesting to look at something else besides computers ;-).

just a thought on speed

[shaitand]

Physics geek speak up here.

I'm curious, wouldn't the maximum speed of transmission be "virtually" instant with a fluid gate.

The speed of signaling of course would be a bottleneck limited to the speed of sound... but if you send a photon on a trip down a fibre optic cable, THAT photon has to reach the other side to transmit data.

With fluid however you merely displace a molecule on one end and a molecule on the other end drops off, it doesn't take any longer regardless of distance right?

This doesn't even break our guessed rules since nothing is actually traveling faster than the speed of light (any given molecule is traveling only a molecule length at the speed of sound right?).

Re:just a thought on speed

[Control Group]

Er

No

The signal will flow through the tube at whatever speed waves propagate through the medium.

This is why sonar has a delay between the ping and the echo; the wave takes time to travel.

And "instantaneous" would absolutely break our understanding of the c limit, since our understanding is that no information can travel faster than c. This would be information moving faster.

Re:just a thought on speed

[JustNiz]

I've long wondered about that but with respect to mechanics...

If you tie a piece of very non-stretchable string to an indicator that detects when the other end is pulled (e.g. a hinged flag ) wouldn't the time between pulling the remote end and the inidicator detecting the pull be instantaneous no matter how long the string is? (Therefore you are defeating the c limit)?

If not, why not, and where does the extra string come from as one end has moved before the other?

Re:just a thought on speed

[adamdeprince]

Wrong. The information transmission speed is limited to the speed of sound of the fluid at best. Displace on molecule at one end and you have to wait for it to be displaced at the other. Inertia, friction, vessel wall flexing and the compresability of the fluid all slow and attentuate the amplitude of your signal.

Re:just a thought on speed

[sexylicious]

Every real material stretches a bit when put in that situation. Even diamond.

That kind of reaction is governed purely by the speed of sound in the material, which depends on the material density, and modulus of elasticity for solids (but temperature in fluids).

You can get things to happen faster than the speed of sound in the material though. Take det-cord for example. It's got a speed of sound that's roughly 1500 feet per second of the material. But if you ignite it, the shock that's created from the combustion of the material travels at close to 6000 feet per second.

There are two different types of combustion: deflagration and detonation. And the only difference between the two is the speed at which the explosion propagates.



The only situation that comes close to what you are describing with your very non-stretchable string would be a bose-einstein condensate, chilled to just barely above absolute zero. In theory, if you have a bunch of particles in a bose-einstein condensate, then they all share the same quantum state. You have basically a superfluid of atoms that are in exact lockstep with each other. Now, the theory goes that if you were to make the condensate very large, you'd have a large volume of stuff that behaves as though it were one piece; disturb one end and you get the same disturbance on the other.

BUT, the speed that the disturbance propagates is still limited to the speed of light. Just like waves on a still pond: that wave speed is fixed by the properties of the water. In the case of the universe, the speed of light is fixed by the properties of the universe.

Re:just a thought on speed

[Control Group]

For what you propose to happen, the string wouldn't have to be "very" non-stretchable, it would have to be perfectly non-stretchable, and no such material exists.

On the distance/time scales encountered when dealing with engineering and mechanics, it's an assumption that can be of value, sort of like "disregarding friction from the air" prefacing every problem in high school physics texts. But it's no more accurate than the notional immovable object, unstoppable force, or frictionless surface.

(Although I seem to recall that liquid He is truly frictionless, come to think of it)

Re:just a thought on speed

[Control Group]

Just checking the text received when you post, had to post to do it.

Nothing to see, here.

Early 60's tech. Soviets were using vacuum tubes.

[spamhog]

This stuff has been tried long before most of you were born.

The rationale was radiation and EMP hardness. If a satellite were to get blasted by an EMP hit, the fluid gates would ROTFL.

Problems were (in random order):
- leaks
- speed
- power
- no Moore's law, esp. w.r.t. frightening cost
in sizeable devices
(that was pre-nanotech days)
- interfacing.

This was before nanotech, so the funny surface tension / Van der Waals / cold fusion / whatever effects were just beginning to complicate matters.

Back then the Soviets were doing some incredible stuff with integrated vacuum tube things - supposedly, up to 80 active devices per bottle, used in avionics and advanced radar. That too would have been EMP/rad hardened, but instead of having to mop up the fluorinert spills, you could use them to warm your hands during the long Kamchatka winter.

Old tech.....

[K1-V116]

Hydraulic computing is nothing new -- I remember reading about something similar in Scientific American back in the eighties, being used as an EMP resistant backup for fly-by-wire systems on fighter jets.

Somewhere in the same time period, they also published something about implementing logic using model trains, just for fun. :)

Why over sell it?

[Transcendent]

...to carry out the basic logic operations NOT, AND, OR, XOR, NOR and NAND

All you need is a NAND... you can make *anything* else out of a few NANDs.

Re:Why over sell it?

[swingerman]

...and NOR. NANDs and NORs are "logically complete" and can each can be combined with others of its kind to create any of the other operations.

There's nothing new under the... ocean.

[argent]

Back in the '70s I visited the submarine my cousin was serving on (the HMAS Ovens). The Ovens was nearing the end of its life... it dated back to WWII.

It used a fluidic computer.

Fluidic computers are great when you have to deal with an environment where there's a danger of fire, or where the use of electric power is otherwise undesirable.

What is the sound of one number adding?

[CBDSteve]

"Half Adding" ...?

Is that some kind of Zen thing?

"What is 4 plus?"

Speed Grades?

[juglugs]

Does the speed get affected by the Lunar Cycle?

;-)

Only the size is new

[mwood]

Fluidic circuits have been around at least since I read about them in Popular Science as a teenager in the 1970s. Making them small enough to think it reasonable to build something as complex as an adder is new, and for that, kudos.

New BOFH excuse: viscosity-index improver wore out.

Grummna F-14

[maitas]

As far as I remember, the Grumman F-14 airplane has a pneumatic computer as a backup just in case it needs to use its nuclear-warehead air-air Phoenix misilles, since the electromagnetic pulse would fry all its electronic fly-by-wire systems...

Uh, yes, you do want it.

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the scenario: You want to produce a device that processes information without being detectable by its electromatic emissions, or damageable by electromagnetic pulse.

The analogy to modern speed-optimized electronic circuitry would be to make those flow-switches operate fast enough to process pressure-front pulses moving thru the fluid rather than thinking in classical terms like [steady-state] "flow". I'm not saying that very articulately, but you probably get the picture.

Sure, the speed of sound & the miniaturization will never catch up with silicon. But you have some pretty respectable niche markets, what with EMP-hardening, and making hard-to-scan-for bugging devices. Information *can* be processed fast enough for those uses, if just a little more work is put into it.

I dare say undetectable bugs are a bit of a holy grail in certain circles.

NCR at the1963 World's Fair

[Baldrson]

From the Boundary Institute's CV list:

Thomas Etter's background is in mathematics and philosophy. He has worked in various ways with computers, holding several early patents on integrated circuits, one of which was demonstrated by National Cash Register Inc. at the 1963 World's Fair.

Etter's integrated circuit demonstration was of a fluidic device.

BYTE Magazie Had an Article On This

[LifesABeach]

About 20 years ago there were 2 magazines, BYTE, and MicroComputing; I haven't thought about them in years. Looks like someone stumbled over an old article.

which carries out half the operation of addition

[Anonymous Coward]

A really poor definition of a half adder.

A Half Adder adds 2 binary bits (2 inputs) and has an Output and a Carry Output.

A Full Adder adds 2 binary bits and has a Carry Input (3 inputs). It has an Output and a Carry Output.
If you set the Carry Input of a Full Adder to zero, you have a Half Adder.

gewg_

Plus, it's EMP safe

[MMHere]

Plus, it's EMP safe:

If the big bomb goes off, or aliens arrive and zap our planet with a huge static electricity pulse, fluidic computers will survive the event.