Slashdot Mirror
Nanocomputing Proof Point
untulis writes "HP Labs and UCLA researchers have apparently been able to produce logic gates via chemical processes rarher than standard lithography, making gates only a few atoms in size, according to Saturday's San Jose Mercury News. The article describes the gates as being a thousand times smaller than current gates. Mass production is at least a decade away, if the process turns out to be commerically feasible. "
competition-driven, you do NOT want to fully
publish your results until you have complete
proof-of-concept; especially in lucritive areas
like this, there are dozens of other labs (US
and int'l) watching for advances like this,
and they might be able to beat you to the
punch if you leak too many details. In this
case, this could cost the group a patent, a
grant, or other rewards for coming up with the
first proof-of-concept.
That's why articles like this, or the one about
teleportation being possible from about 6 months ago, or many other of the science articles being
posted to
group is strongly protecting their potental
assets.
"Pinky, you've left the lens cap of your mind on again." - P&TB
"I can see my house from here!" - ST:
This is so kewl! I can't wait to get one of these babies so that I run Quake at 10000 FPS. And an overclocked dual processor system would be even more AWS0M!!!!!! True there aren't many details in the article, but I'm sure their irreluvant anyway. An if all those clewless researchers working on pushing silicon faster or on the hundreds of alternative new technologies wood just work on this one, we'd get it in only a few years!!!
With such raducl performance, all those complicated MP (massively polynomal) complete problems will be trivial! Imagine finding factors of a Hamiltonian circuit in just seconds!!! Course one of my teachers mumbled something about hyuge speed increases not really helping on MP problems, but that's obviously B0GUZ!!
The bad thing will be that this might keep Microsux with their bloatware in business, but that's OK cuz Linux will rock even more on this puppy. Forget those GNOME vs KDE flamewars; we'll have enough juice to run both at once!
David
I call him mini-Bill.
He'd still be a biter! Ha!
"Die Scott (McNeally)!" Haha!
- Ahem. Sorry. Shag flashback.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Most of the time they (ChEngs) play with latex, lubricants, various products of fermentation and some compounds that can literally blow your mind.
:)
Same as all other college students.
Nice major, but I wouldn't want to live there.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
It's not just UCLA, HP labs is involved as well. They are possibly running with HP funding and therefore under HP Non-Disclosure. I do research at UofT, and while Canadian Universities are less dependent upon corporate grants than American Universities (That's changing, unfortunatly), there is still a strong relationship between any lab and it's corporate sponsor.
.2 microns wide, and the N-doped wells about, oh .4 microns wide, etc." So someone in the class, frustrated with these vague numbers asked for the exact numbers. And the guy gives her this pained look and says, "Uh, well, I'm actually doing some development right now with a die fab (chip manufacturing firm) and I can't release the numbers, I can't even tell you what firm I'm working for."
;)
In fact, during a VLSI course this year, a professor at UofT was speaking about transistor sizes in chips and was giving us rough sizes like "Poly lines can be, oh around
Pretty spooky for an "open academic institution" eh?
Also, it is just possible that they're not sure of their numbers yet. The scientific community is merciless with those who release numbers that aren't rock solid. They're probably just covering their asses. I would.
Michael Gentili
- He's just some guy, you know?
Arggh!
Repeat after me: You can't send information this way. You can't send information this way. You can't send information this way.
Imagine the following scenario:
- You have a bag containing a black marble and a white marble.
- Two people pick marbles with their eyes closed and then,
- Without looking walk a far distance away and then look at their marble
Instantly, they'll know what color marble they have and the other person has. So what. Not one single bit of information has been transmitted from one person to the other; all that's happened is that equivalent bits of information have been sent from the bag to each person. And since it was a random bit of information to begin with, you're no better off than before.More smoke in the water.. do journalists just hang around universities waiting for people to make "breakthrough's" so they can go and not publish the results. How much stuff like this gets published into scientific journals, with way more detail than this, and never makes it onto places like slashdot? Surely people working at UCLA should be a little more open about their research than, say, Xerox/PARC. That assumption appears to be false.. or is the popular media just jumping the gun a little.
Oh and BTW.. if it aint molecular manufacturing (that's little nanobes that can self-replicate and make a wide range of ridged structures.. see nano.xerox.com/nano/) then it aint a breakthrough in nanotechnology.. mildstone, maybe.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I read an article a few years ago about a "computer" built from molecules of chloroform. I think that it was tested by searching through a snapshot of the web to find a particular word. Bookmarks come and go, but I found a few articles on the subject:
A Vision of Synthetic Prophecy
Quantum Computing with Molecules
The computing aspect of this is really cool, as it would make factoring Really Large Numbers a snap (because these computers would be massively parallel and would be execute many instructions in one step). These machines would have the ability to factor a 400 digit number in about a year. The networking applications of quantum computing are pretty interesting as well. If you can create two photons with opposite polarization, as soon as you measure the polarization of one, the state of the other is immediately fixed, regardless of the distance.
The "writer" of the article hinted that without advances such as these, chip makers would be able to extend Moore's law "only for another 10 to 15 years at most."
Not that I am in any way looking forward to technological stagnation, but wouldn't it be interesting if we did hit a brick wall for a few years. All those surplus design elements (dancing paperclip, configuration wizrds, the gui itself) would suddenly be seen as the drain they actually are.
Software doesn't run fast enough? Upgrade to the latest model. But what if the latest model chip was just as fast as the one you have now?
I know, I know, more RAM, multiple processors, Beowulf clusters, but it would still be interesting to see the effects of a problem like that.