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Paint-on Laser Brings Optical Computing Closer
holy_calamity writes "New Scientist has a story about a laser made by painting a solution of semiconductor crystals onto glass. It could be used to break the interconnect barrier by having optical interconnects, the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law unless a faster way of connecting chips is found."
Current latency from digg to slashdot is 172,800,000 milliseconds. (this was on digg 2 days ago)
My name is coaxeus, and I approve this message. In fact, I think it is awesome.
i win!!
Is there any chance this paint is waterproof.
Sincerely,
Dr Evil.
liqbase
someone paints a shark?
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
The idea of programming for a quantam computer is daunting to me (and the idea of any user--AT THIS TIME--needing the power of it besides research labs/hackers is hard for me to fathom); however, I've always thought going optical would be a great move--faster than electricity, but still conceptually the same. In addition, if we wanted to it wouldn't be that hard to change it from binary (light on/light off) to amounts of light (of course the same thing could be done with electric interconnects but by voltage--just not as consistently)--and that is good in terms of AI as the human mind uses more complex interconnects than binary... Speed is almost always a good thing though. First Post?
Read my blog posts on usability.
"A laser created by simply painting a solution of crystals onto glass could be used to make super-fast computers that use light instead of electricity"
I'm sorry, is light faster than electricity?
It could be used to break the interconnect barrier by having optical interconnects, the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law unless a faster way of connecting chips is found. Wha? Am I dumb, sense this? makes: does not.
Optical interconnects could make for far more reliable connections between system components. Ribbon cables etc break easily, and are a real nightmare for assembly. OTOH, a few specks of dust in an optical connection could cause a lot of grief (reflection etc) making one wonder what the longterm prospects of shipping optically connected products are.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
It is not the travelling of electrons that gets the electric signal propagating.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I've suddenly got a new, wonderful idea for a stupid "Pimp My Ride" car customization.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
First comment already did the joke. And better.
Google has failed me, turning up references to it but nothing about it.
So can someone explain what it is... and what exactly the problem is?
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
But, will we have 5 megawatts by mid-May?
exactly. so, while the speed of light through a vacuum, or even air is considerably faster, it doesn't effect the speed of the signal propagating through the circuit.
It is not the travelling of electrons that gets the electric signal propagating.
.25 and .75c
(IIRC, hams use a factor of around .7c for the speed in a whip
antenna, while tiny ethernet strands only give around .33c).
The travel itself, no. The wavefront of "pressure" moving along the path of the electrons, yes. The electrons themselves move at only (depending heavily on current and wire diameter) around 1-10cm per hour.
But the wave still only travels somewhere between
Does the difference there really matter all that much? For long-distance communication, sure. But for chip interconnects? Doubtful.
The article pushing mainly for cost-effectiveness.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
That's not a moon, it's the galaxies largest paint ball!
Now I will have to build a new Flux Capacitor!
"The observation made in 1965 by Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel, that the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits had doubled every year since the integrated circuit was invented. Moore predicted that this trend would continue for the foreseeable future. In subsequent years, the pace slowed down a bit, but data density has doubled approximately every 18 months, and this is the current definition of Moore's Law, which Moore himself has blessed. Most experts, including Moore himself, expect Moore's Law to hold for at least another two decades."
It has to do with transistors.. not the speed of processors.
There are frequency limitations to the speed at which processors can be run. Something about crossover fields at frequency or some such.
Light would have the ability to be switched much more quickly, but if you're going to switch it with electricity based circuits.....
The intention of quantum computing is not to replace, but rather to complement classical (i.e. digital) computing. Quantum computing can dramatically speed up certain tasks, such as cryptography and searching. Even though they cannot yet be implemented, a number of important quantum algorithms have already been discovered. Most - but not all - quantum algorithms return probabilistic answers, rather than clear-cut answers as most classical algorithms do.
Shor's algorithm for factoring numbers could be used to rapidly crack RSA encryption. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shor's_algorithm
Grover's algorithm can be used to search an unsorted database in O(n?2) time. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grover's_algorithm
The article and summary seem to be a bit misleading and vauge about how the speed increase arrises. The great benefit of optical computing is that it allows the signals to get much much closer together than electronic circuits, and as such allow more compact circuits, which as we know generally means faster. Interestingly, electronic signals in wires and optical signals in fibers have roughly identical upper speed limits (light in free-space optical computers is faster, but also almost impossible to do anything useful with), so its the density which is the major factor.
Electrons are charged, so as you squeeze transistors closer together, the wires get thinner and closer together, and you get cross-talk and interference between them. Photons however hardly interact at all, so you can have many beams in the same space, and theres very little heat to be dissipated. Multiplw frequencies can also be used, resulting in massivly parallel computing (another GoodThing).
There are downsides with optical computing still, photons cannot be stopped and stored (easily), meaning any kind of useful computer in the near term is likely to be some sort of electro-optical hybrid, with photons carrying signals and electrons storing them
I understand that one of the factors keeping chip sizes down/complexities up is electrical signal propigation delays. When it takes more than a clock cycle for a signal to go from one end of the chip to the other, you have a Serious Problem.
If optical chips end up being N times faster, they can then build chips N times larger before running into similar problems... One would hope that the individual transistors are the same size however. If the signal is N times faster, and the individual elements on the chips are N times bigger, you really haven't gained anything (outside of the marketing department anyway).
--Mark
It's a laser-pumped laser. This means that the power supply for this laser is (drumroll): Another laser!
The only way for this device to be useful is if you already have a laser on-chip. And if we already have a laser on-chip, what do we need this for?
The bottleneck in computing isn't Moore's Law of transistor density. It's programming paradigms. We're wasting the vast majority of processing/memory/transmission capacity with linear programming, rather than parallel programs. Procedural programs are based entirely on the bottleneck paradigm, with the entire system reduced to a single boolean operation at any given time. Any parallelism is exceptional, and difficult to express in the symbols humans send to computers.
Parallel dataflow and distributed control are long overdue to the mainstream. Compilable UML is a slow, crude path to it. When I can draw a flowchart of primitive objects, any of which are packaged procedures or other flowed objects, and watch it run, I'll have a much better shot at exploiting all the compute/storage/transmit capacity available at that time. When "compilers" can distribute my data among the resources according to topology and analytical prediction, I'll finally get full use of the machines I'm using. Until then, I'm doubling my HW capacity every year or two so it can use half the efficiency gain running inefficient software.
--
make install -not war
if you stick your hand in your new optical computer and it happens to cross a beam, do you shut down, or what happens if that amazing pain on your comp gets a scratch? buy a new one?, this just sounds like a really expensive waste of money unless you keep it in an antistatic room on a velvet cushion, and never even DREAM of using it, much less for practical application...
It could be used to break the interconnect barrier by having optical interconnects, the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law unless a faster way of connecting chips is found."
People who make run-on sentences should be shot, don't you agree.
Moore's Law is only an observation, not a performance goal. Of course it'll go away at some point. Maybe the slowing of density increases points to a maturing of one part of the industry.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
The article does not describe the source of the energy for the laser. That is the expensive to produce part. All of these nanocrystal lasers that I have seen require excitation from another special type of powerful laser(short pulse) which cost in excess of 100K to work so it kind of makes the 20 dollar cost of painting the chip unimportant.
I recall that a semiconductor engineer mentioned "optical computing" to me at least 20 years ago when I was a kid, and I was thrilled by it. Will this involve the interconnects only, or the whole CPU? Maybe the whole system could be built into an optical chip?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
For example, suppose you wanted something to operate at 10GHz. Now suppose that the medium you use is such that the wave moves at .5c. That gives you a wavelength of just 1.5cm. That means on larger dies, you can start having signal propagation problems, in that you won't get a wave all the way across the chip before the next ones starts. Plays hell on synchronized processor designs like we use today.
It's not a problem yet, that I know of, but something that we have to think about in the future.
Oh ya, well what about the time I found you naked with that bowl of Jello?
isnt that the reccomended power for Vista?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
That is the mean electron drift velocity, the absolute electron velocity between collisions is on the order of hundred thousand meters per second, depending on the temperature.
That is still a lot slower than the signal propagation velocity, which is comparable to the speed of light (0.7c or so), subject to reactive loading.
Hey, let's go play laser-tag!
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
This is slashdot, and noone quibbled about the article saying millimetres, when the picture clearly says micrometres?
:(
shame on you guys!
A few paragraphs of vague details, then a sophomoric rehash of the last 30 years of semiconductor design. Did New Scientist need some filler material to meet a publishing page quota or something?
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I had this idea where calculations running at one frequency and calculations running at a non-interfering frequency could be run over the same chip substrate, maybe even more than two frequencies.
WTF was Kent doing with his hands when the laser came through Dr Hathaway's window? It looked like he was having a Grand Mal seizure. It has always bothered me.
"Patience is not a virtue, it's a waste of time."
Well, I guess consumer computing will just remain an "electrifying" experience.
But, can't they make "paint-on" CPUs? I mean, the CPUs and the interconnects are like hand and wrist, right? Well, can they make them of similar "DNA" and part? Or, are they trying not to "kill off" some sacred part of the CPU industry?
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
[i]the interconnect barrier threatens Moore's law[/i]
Terribly sorry to rain on your parade, but the fact that we live in a 3D world with a speedlimit limits computing speed eventually.
Electrical signals in wires travel (according to rough measurements I did about two decades ago) at about 0.3c (a third of the lightspeed). Light travels at 0.6c (in glass).
So you win about a factor of two by moving to light, provided you use fibreglass to channel the communications to the right place.
If you Aim lasers through normal air, you can win a factor of three. Wow. That might extend Moore another 2 years, but it does not solve the fact that physics limits Moore eventually.
In theory, "computing nodes" can be connected using for example hypercubes. 4 nodes form a square with max communications distance of 2, 8 nodes form a cube, with max distance of 3. And so on.
Wether these "computing nodes" are complete computers, elements of a parallel system, or just elements of a CPU, doesn't matter.
As the dimension of the hypercube increases, the physical placement of the nodes in 3D-space means that the communications links between the nodes starts to increase. The Lightspeed limits theoretical computation speed to what you might expect of a 3D structure.
I had been wondering how to create lasers small enough to make a palm-mounted version of a laser-induced-plasma-channel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser-Induced_Plasma_ Channel
Now I have it.
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http://www.legalwarfare.com/index.cfm?attributes.
Warning - link contains strong language =)