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Fluid Logic Chips

Posted by timothy on from the if-rains-pours dept.

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"?"

5 of 250 comments (clear)

  1. How fast? by cbrocious · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Disconnect and self-destruct, one bullet at a time.
    1. Re:How fast? by polecat_redux · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

  2. chemistry and computing? by k98sven · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:It's not like this is new logic... by NanoGator · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "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?

    --
    "Derp de derp."
  4. Corning fluidics (from about 1972) by klubar · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.