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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.
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.
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
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.
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.