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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.
Does mean that I can finally replace the vacuum tubes in my computer? I am hoping for something that can fit in my bedroom.
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.
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.
I've personally never believed that whole "our ancestors invented the wheel" baloney. I mean, we went around carrying objects in bags and on our backs for millenia, and suddenly they invent a wheel AND an axel?!? Give me a break! They clearly reverse-engineered alien tech to get that working.
We are dealing with quantum applications here. Maybe you should look a little harder. It's small after all...
Just think of it this way, with the new computing power you should be able to design the perfect tin foil hat.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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
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.
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.
that transistors couldn't have been invented the all of a sudden way they were in 1947... and now we're suddenly expected to believe that HP has this kind of working tech?
No, you're logic isn't consistent.
If we've captured an alien craft (I'm not dismissing the possibility) and they were far more advanced than us they would have a somewhat stable technology base.
OK let's run with the possibility: so we study the systems onboard and find out they're using transistors. Now it's 50 years later and we find out they were using cross-bar latches?
If they had cross-bar latch-based systems they wouldn't be have been using transistors in the first place.
Given all the work in nanotech in the past decade if you had to stake a claim you'd be better off saying that we 'stole' transistors than these cross-bar latches. But then we'd be about to have better technology than the Aliens and our European friends still can't land a probe on the nearest planet.
Now what's really interesting is that HP comes out with this days after dissolving their Itaniac partnership with Intel, the pioneers of the transistor.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
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.
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.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.
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
Overall, I consider your comment one of the most insightful I've ever read on Slashdot.
No offense to the original poster, but this is not exactly a compliment. It's like saying, "Your dog's ass smells the best of any dog's ass I've ever smelled."
Why thank you!
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
"...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.