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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.""
Additionally, the crossbar latch can be locked across the steering wheel to prevent car theft.
Unknown host pong.
Some funding for the experiment came from the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)
Yeah. I'm betting that "some" of the tech used came from the same source as well. I mean, if it's been proven [tt] that transistors couldn't have been invented the all of a sudden way they were in 1947 (or even using today's technology), then how are they expecting us to believe that this new tech isn't reverse-engineered UFO tech? We're currently still miles away from acheiving anything in quantum computing, and now we're suddenly expected to believe that HP has this kind of working tech? Give me a break.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
Does mean that I can finally replace the vacuum tubes in my computer? I am hoping for something that can fit in my bedroom.
if not then im not interested.
This post brought to you by Captain Obvious.
Take that, all you people who said that this year would be the year the moore's law beats us!
I think I speak for the sarcastic majority when I say this has little, if anything to do with Quantum Computing as defined thusfar.
..the Original statement by HP and even more important HP's paper in the Journal of Applied Physics.
This Sunday at the Engine Room
QUANTUM TRANSISTOR AND THE CROSSBAR LATCH
with special guests
SIGNAL
$10 cover, must be 21 to attend
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. I remember recently a spate of doomsayers going on about how circuits couldn't get much smaller than they are now, and how this would be the end of easy processor speedups. Well I guess they were wrong again. I don't think that will stop them from telling us that circuits can't be built smaller than this however.
Philosophy.
it is going to transform the way we computer simply out of the sheer computing power we'll be able to throw at things.
Yep. After that no more thinking will be required. Just brute force everything. Chess, unsolved equations, protein folding, you name it. We won't need science any more.
I work for a team in research at HP. This latch has potential, but it hasn't been fully tested. The PR dept just simply went off and decided to get everyone excited.
Just pray it ends up passing all testing and becoming everything they expect. Otherwise we might end up with an Intel-like pentium division problem on our hands...
Yeah, I'm a Republican AND a geek. It is possible.
How long before this goes the way of Alpha or HPUX or Bluestone or PA-Risc. Nice to see HP's still doing cool stuff; but I can already see Carly thinking "Hey, Dell doesn't have that kind of cost center, let's cut it".
Next thing you are going to tell me is that this will run Duke Nukem Forever.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
We are dealing with quantum applications here. Maybe you should look a little harder. It's small after all...
If it works, would actual cpu-producing factories be able to implement it, or would it require a new process and new fabs to produce?
And they claim impressive (potential) performance gains... do the average computer user really need more than 4 Ghz? Or will the market for this new technology be supercomputer-class computers only?
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
EETimes story
It's Patent #6586965
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
If this pans out to be viable, it will be interesting to see if it is promoted as a scientific (i.e. open) discovery, or a patentable (i.e. closed) invention.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It'll be region coded. All the real power and functionality you want will be available in another region.
Life sucks and then you upgrade.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
HP develops product with strange name and amazing powers!
People, check out their site. They do this kind of stuff all the time. It's research - not an actual product. Why aren't there stories like this every time they have a press release?
Check out this announcement that declares an extension of Moore's law for 50 years!
I hope you posted from home :)
Go here for teh [sic] funny.
Greetings,
I read the Press Release and this "has the potential to"... My guess is that HP are suffering at the moment (AIX machines are cheaper and more powerful than HP-UX ones, guess which we are buying less of) and this Press Release was published as a way of boosting the stock price.
Given that HP are dropping PA-Risc in favour of Itanium and that Intel appear to be dropping Itanium, HP seem to be dropping out of the large Unix market. I am sure that the PC Server market is good to them but surely diversification is the better way to stay competitive? Before anyone suggests it, there are some things that you just can't do as efficiently on lots of little servers that you can do on one larger server. For example distributed databases have locking issues that monolithic ones don't, and some of our legacy applications are still single threaded in parts.
Z.
-- Under/Overrated is meta-moderation, and therefore is Redundant.
Ah...that explains why my XP system does spooky things sometimes...
The NSA: The only part of the US government that actually listens.
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.
From nanoinvestornews:
A molecular crossbar latch is provided, comprising two control wires and a signal wire that crosses the two control wires at a non-zero angle to thereby form a junction with each control wire. Each junction forms a switch and the junction has a functional dimension in nanometers. The signal wire selectively has at least two different voltage states, ranging from a 0 state to a 1 state, wherein there is an asymmetry with respect to the direction of current flow from the signal wire through one junction compared to another junction such that current flowing through one junction into (out of) the signal wire can open (close) while current flowing through the other junction out of (into) the signal wire can close (open) the switch, and wherein there is a voltage threshold for switching between an open switch and a closed switch. Further, methods are provided for latching logic values onto nanowires in a logic array, for inverting a logic value, and for restoring a voltage value of a signal in a nano-scale wire."
From USTPO
"A novel switching device is provided with an active region arranged between first and second electrodes and including a molecular system and ionic complexes distributed in the system. A control electrode is provided for controlling an electric field applied to the active region, which switches between a high-impedance state and a low-impedance state when the electrical field having a predetermined polarity and intensity is applied for a predetermined time."
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.
No, no, no! Looking harder will simply collapse the function down to a single outcome and prevent it from working. The trick is NOT to look. :)
Compression too
But what would happen to poor old encryption? would it be possible to have keys long enough to prevent brute force and short enough to encrypt quickly?
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?
For some reason this kindled the mental image of a giant gorilla throwing poop at a brick wall which suddenly transforms into a cure for cancer. I don't know who is worse off the person who thinks that sheer computing power will solve everything or me :-/
SIGFAULT
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
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Maybe I'm being troll like, but everytime somebody "announces" some dramatic breakthrough lately (medical, computing, so on...) We are always at least 10 years from actual stuff I might be able to buy.
It's unfair to tease me and then never come out with the stuff!
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.
That's for militaries and governments, not for us. The way in which it works to prevent interception also works to prevent relaying... so unless you have a fiber line or laser link directly to whoever it is you are communicating with, it's useless as I understand it.
Bah, I'll never use a nanoscale latch computer. My transistor computer sounds warmer and less sterile! Plus it distorts prettily...
They'll keep working through an EMP that would fry semiconductor electronics. You can reduce the size and MTBF of your glass envelope system by large scale integration of circuitry on the anode. Fewer glass envelopes means fewer failures. Ideally, you could get the whole system in one envelope. Then just keep some spares to replace as needed.
She is going to pretty steamed when she finds out there are a few people left not devoted to figuring out ways to get customers to buy more ink.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
HP got a patent for this in July of 2003 (in patent #6,586,965), filed Oct 2001. What is news is that they've successfully demonstrated it working.
"...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.
They didn't need wheels, they had giant robotic daschunds to carry whatever needed to be moved.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
you could simultaneously simulate a giant gorilla throwing poop at a brick wall, a stucco wall, a steel wall, and a glass wall, although you would have to stipulate the condition which would select the simulation results you actually get - such as which wall yields the largest splatter. That would obviously be the last calculation we would ever need.
(A lot of people don't realize that only one of the 2^n calculations is returned, but one can conditionalize which calculation is returned, so that ultimately only the "useful" calculation is returned. All of the other calculations are sent to our unlucky quantum brothers in other universes. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the cosmic backround radiation wasn't found to actually be such a residue from our lucky quantum brothers who have already developed quantum computing!)
((Yes, I'm just kidding.))
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
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.
But without a similar leap in software design methodology, we'll still be writing crap software. The more powerful the software, the more complex it will be. The more complex, the more bug ridden. History already demonstrates what happens when you give more computer power to programmers: eye candy that crashes a lot. All quantum computing will do will be to make your software crash that much faster.
I'm not being cynical here, I'm being realistic. I work on a large project, and software complexity is our achilles heal. Computing power is increasing faster than the ability to design software for it. The tired mantra of "garbage collection prevents all bugs" is wearing thin. The only software technology that manages complexity is "simplicity". Smaller is better. Standardize and decouple all components. Go the Unix route of tiny utilities doing only one thing but doing well. Eschew the Microsoft model of jamming more and more features that no one will ever use into a twenty year old code base.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Quantum computing is overhyped in its computing potential. It has been shown that quantum computers do not gain a computational advantage in these problems without an exponetial number of gates.
Interesting as well is that the factoring problem that made quantum computing famous has never actually been proven to be hard on a classical computer. This is to say, it is perfectly possible that factoring can be done on a regular computer just as fast as a quantum computer.
Not at all. Diode noise will do just fine.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
You didn't know device manager was based on quantum mechanics?. It's impossible to know whether Windows will recognize the device, and whether it will accept the drivers. or not until you actually connect it. Until you do so, the device in a "connected/not-connected state". And by plugging in the device, you changed the outcome.
Far too much money in this country (USA) is wasted subsidizing services for people who choose to live in rural areas.
Perhaps because the export $$$ those rural areas generate go some way to pay for the huge import bills that cities generate.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
The amount of computing that can be called "brute force" varies enourmosly between different problems.
For instance take the problem that Gauss is presumed to have solved in elementary school: add all numbers from 1 to 100. Gauss realized that the sequence can be broken into 50 pairs, 1 and 100, 2 and 99, etc, every which one adds to 101, so the answer is 101*50=5050. That's one example where we know one simple logical solution that takes much less computing effort than the more obvious addition of every number in the series.
OTOH, there are many other problems for which the only logical solution known requires a lot of computation. One well-known example is the four-color map theorem. Do you really believe that this theorem has been proved with "just" brute force, without the use of "science"?
I'm not an expert in the field, so I might be talking bullshit here, but as I understand it, there are problems in group theory where one can demonstrate formally that the only solution requires an amount of computation that's suspiciously close to "brute" force. The four-color map problem I mentioned required 1200 hours of computation when it was first solved in 1975.
Haven't you ever seen two dogs meeting in the street? The first thing they do is to smell each other's ass. That's because a dog's ass has an absolutely wonderful smell! It must be true, how could a hundred million dogs be wrong?
They are in fact not smelling their arses but their genitals which indeed have an absolutely wonderful smell for dogs just like human genitals have an equally wonderful smell for humans. (Or so I've read.) The anus is being smelled as a side effect and its smell doesn't differ between both sexes so it is not very helpful as a guide to copulation. (Dogs don't usually make anal sex.)
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."