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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.""
I think I speak for the sarcastic majority when I say this has little, if anything to do with Quantum Computing as defined thusfar.
Don't get me wrong, this is great and all, (see a better article at EETimes) but to implement microprocessor-complexity devices with single nanometer technology, we need single nanometer scale wires and the technology with which to 'draw' them onto silicon.
We already have enough trouble at 90nm with wiring, and it's only getting worse at 65nm.
This looks like a great leap in device technology, but we need similar advances in lithography to really use it.
Once we figure out the basics, it is going to transform the way we computer simply out of the sheer computing power we'll be able to throw at things.
No, it won't.
Quantum computing (which has very little to do with the parent article) will change the way we think about computationally "hard" problems. Things like prime factorization, things like NP-completeness, things like cryptography.
But quantum computing will not replace the general-purpose Turing-complete model of computation we currently use. We will more likely see the idea of a quantum-coprocessor, something that you can interact with through a conventional CPU.
The problem with quantum computing involves the complexity of doing simple tasks... Yeah, it can factor absolutely mind-boggling numbers in one unit of time. It also takes that same one unit of time to figure out 1 + 1 = 2. The problem there involves the length of that unit of time - Between loading a state onto a set of qubits, them almost instantanously solving the problem, then reading the state off of them, you could have done potentially billions of cycles of normal CPU ops (no, I don't have a time-scale to quote for this, but I would consider it exceedingly optimistic to hope we eventually get it down to the millisecond level).
This development has so much potential because it points to a very, very major leap in the size of what we would currently consider a transistor... From 90nm, used by Intel and AMD's absolute latest mass-production facilities, down to a few nanometers. This means lower power requirements, faster CPU clocks, and much better areal density of functional units (getting down into the range of a few dozen atoms per switch, rather than hundreds of thousands at 90nm). The linked article also vaguely alludes to easier manufacturing techniques, but skimps on that one.
Overall, I consider your comment one of the most insightful I've ever read on Slashdot.
;-)
If they had cross-bar latch-based systems they wouldn't be have been using transistors in the first place.
We still use vacuum tubes and electromechanical relays alongside transistors. Perhaps crossbar latch technology simple can't handle large enough currents to interface well with the macroscopic world, so the aliens needed to use transistors to switch relatively massive currents up into the microamps...
So, no doubt in another 50 years, we'll find another layer of alien tech we have finally reached the manufacturing capability of making use of, and we can get down to using some cool property of the d orbital geometry as stressed in negative Scandium ions. No doubt the NSA's xenoassimilatory researchers missed this at the present time, since they considered it a mere impurity in the semiconductor substrate.
"...this thing is not a transistor... hence, end of moore's law."
If you look at the orignial paper, Moore is talking about "components," not specifically "transistors." There's no semantic reason why this couldn't continue to apply to the new technology.