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

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..

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.

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*

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!