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HP's Crossbar Latch... Next-Gen Transistor?
moojin writes "CNN.com reports that "in a paper published in Tuesday's Journal of Applied Physics, HP said three members of its Quantum Science Research group propose and demonstrate a "crossbar latch," which provides the signal restoration and inversion required for general computing without the need for transistors.""
..the Original statement by HP and even more important HP's paper in the Journal of Applied Physics.
EETimes story
It's Patent #6586965
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Every new chip design needs virtually new fabs.
Plus, 4 Ghz is not a measure of computing power. And of course, we do need more power than a 4ghz pentium4.
Lots of physics problems (think for example robotics) need to solve numerically differential equations, and that takes power.
As near as I can tell, what they've done here is implement levels of titanium and platinum nano-wires which pass each at right angle. However, to prevent leakage, at the crossover points they are held apart by Rotaxan molecules.
Rotaxan molecules are organic, and have this nifty little molecular ring which enables them to be conductive or not based on its position. Thus, you get your binary switch. This little animal is the "crossbar latch," apparently. And it can be done in something like 40 nanometers, making it scads smaller than current conductive strips.
Unfortunately, I'm having a great deal of trouble tracking down technical details. HP wants to keep its secrets, obviously, but Berkely and Stanford should be a little more forthcoming, think I. Anyone have links to more technical information? It would be greatly appreciated...
What he wants is more important that what I want. What he wants is also more important that what you want.
I agree with your point, but I just think in case people don't know, this isn't true quantum computing, per se. Though the technology does rely on quantum mechanics, and the science will quite possibly lead to quantum computing, all this is is a better transistor. Think transistor is to vacuum tube as nanoscale latch is to transistor. A true quantum computer is actually an entirely different type of computer than we see today, even moreso than a ternary or analog computer is different than a binary computer.
i ntro.html>good article</a> on this:
Cal Tech has a <a href=http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~westside/quantum-
-Amalcon
- Mean operations til failure: ~100
- Switching speed: ~100/sec
So they just need to improve its reliability by a factor of 10^16 or so, the switching speed only by a factor of 10^7 or so.Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
I will be the first to admit that eventually there will be some limit to how small we can make a transistor (or transistor replacement) it seems that we still have a ways to go.
:-)
... which we're also nowhere near.
I knew all that research I did for my novel might come in handy one day.
The theoretical limits of information and computational density (based on quantum density limitations and reletavistic constraints on signalling, i.e. speed-of-light limits) are Bremermann's Limit and the Bekenstein Bounds, and we're one hell of a long way away from that. Practical limitations may be an order of magnitude or two less
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Intel has a good overview on what leakage is all about. Leakage has nothing to do with jumping wire channels, although the electric fields generated between one wire and another in small process geometries cause signal integrity problems such as noise and delay.
Because it doesn't have to actually work to get published - it just needs to be viably interesting (eg. not wrong) and have specific applications.
Remember, applied physics != engineering. It the engineering boys that expect that it works.