Left:
Blue and red lasers reflecting off mirrors -- a
glimpse of things to come in computing technology? Photo Credit: Department of
Energy/Coherent Inc Laser Group.
By replacing electrons and wires with photons, fiber optics, crystals, thin films and mirrors, researchers hope to build a new generation of computers that work a hundred million times faster than today's machines.
"Optical computers can vastly expand data processing and networking speeds into trillions of bits per second, rev up the Internet by more than ten times today's velocity, store thousands of times more data than is now possible -- and do it all with devices and systems that are smaller, cheaper and more reliable than anything we now have!" says Dr. Frazier.
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2001/ast27feb_1.htm?aol17963
Scientists have stopped light in its tracks in two landmark experiments. In doing so they have overcome a fundamental obstacle to the development of quantum computers.
Light normally travels at 300,000 km per second but both groups of researchers slowed a laser beam to a complete standstill by passing it through a specially prepared cell of gas atoms. Later the researchers restarted the light beam and sent it speeding off again.
Ron Walsworth from the Harvard
Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics led one of the groups and says the
demonstration shows how information could be transported in a quantum computer.
"The light could take information from node to node as required," he
told
New Scientist.
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September 2003 Every Friday afternoon at Hewlett-Packard Labs in Palo Alto, CA, R. Stanley Williams, one of the most respected thinkers in the field of molecular electronics, gets his group of 25 research scientists together to talk shop. One by one, they make their way to the conference room. Williams walks in exactly on time, sits down in front, and leans back, frowning, his hands steepled. He was hired by HP in 1995 to rethink the basics of computing and has handpicked the team inside this room to do just that. Williams likes to wear jeans, and his hair reaches halfway down his back, so he gives a first, fleeting impression of quietude and informality. But he apparently never smiles, and his people work 19-hour days to meet his deadlines. Williams waits a few minutes for the habitual latecomers, then stands up. He speaks in an efficient monotone. “We’re going to hear first from Gun-Young today,” he says. “What he has accomplished is magnificent. Everyone here owes him a lunch because his hard work has paid for our salaries for the last several months.” Gun-Young Jung, a recent postdoc from South Korea, stands up and quietly describes his work on nano imprint lithography, a process that uses a physical mold to create features as small as six nanometers across on silicon wafers. That’s more than an order of magnitude smaller than the finest features achievable using today’s advanced photo-lithographic processes. Sometimes things stick to the mold, though. It’s like cake batter sticking to a pan, he says. His presentation lasts about ten minutes and is followed by two others. Listening to these speakers, one after another, gradually conveys a sense of the group’s style. They enjoy self-deprecating humor and inject frequent expressions of bewilderment into their scientific explanations, like “I don’t know” and “it’s still a mystery” and “I still need to investigate,” and even “I am still quite a novice.” And despite their obvious expertise, this isn’t false modesty. Williams’s group faces a monumental task: trying to make computers whose functionality rests on the workings of molecules. To do so will mean reinventing the transistor. While silicon and other inorganic semiconductors have always been the basic building blocks of microchips, it turns out that organic molecules can also have some potentially useful electrical properties. Indeed, over the last few years, researchers have learned to synthesize molecules that can function as electronic switches, holding binary 1s or 0s in memory or taking part in logical operations. And molecules have one significant advantage: they are really small. Such work is critical to the future of computing, because conventional chip fabrication technology is on a collision course with economics. Today’s best computer chips have silicon features as small as 90 nanometers. But the smaller the features, the more expensive the optical equipment needed to manufacture them. A state-of-the-art fabrication plant for silicon microchips now costs some $3 billion to build. A chip in which silicon transistors are replaced with molecular devices, on the other hand, could in principle be fabricated through a simple chemical process as inexpensive as making photographic film. A circuit with 10 billion switches could eventually fit on a grain of salt; that’s a thousand times the density of the transistors in today’s best computers. A computer built from such circuits could search billions of documents or thousands of hours of video in seconds, conduct highly accurate simulations and predictions of weather and other physical phenomena, and do a much better job of imitating human intelligence, perhaps even communicating with us through natural conversation. But no matter how tempting in theory, it’s speculative, blue-sky research, and investing in molecular electronics is a gamble few companies have been willing to make. HP’s confidence in Williams is a big reason it’s one of the exceptions, says Shane Robison, the company’s executive vice president and chief strategy and technology officer. “In addition to his ability to put together a first-class team of cross-disciplinary experts and an emphasis on how to turn science and technology into real products, Stan’s best quality is probably his eternal optimism,” says Robison. Of course, there’s also the lure of immense profits, should Williams’s technology ever displace conventional silicon chips. “Projects this ambitious are always a long shot, but we wouldn’t be doing it if we didn’t think there was a good chance of succeeding,” Robison says. |
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A new type
of “smart” machine that could fundamentally change how people
interact with computers is on the not-too-distant horizon at the
Department of Energy’s
Sandia National Laboratories |
Wednesday, October 15, 2003 Posted: 2:47 PM EDT (1847 GMT)
GENEVA
, Switzerland (Reuters) -- Two major scientific research centres said on Wednesday they had set a new world speed record for sending data across the Internet, equivalent to transferring a full-length DVD film in seven seconds.
The European Organisation for Nuclear Research, CERN, said the feat, doubling the previous top speed, was achieved in a nearly 30-minute transmission over 7,000 kms of network between Geneva and a partner body in California.
CERN, whose laboratories straddle the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva, said
it had sent 1.1 Terabytes of data at 5.44 gigabits a second (Gbps) to a lab at
the California Institute of Technology, or Caltech, on October 1.
This is more than 20,000 times faster than a typical home broadband connection, and is also equivalent to transferring a 60-minute compact disc within one second -- an operation that takes around eight minutes on standard broadband.
Using current technology, a DVD -- or digital video disc -- film of some 90 minutes length takes some 15 minutes to download from the Internet.
Olivier Martin of CERN, which is also the European Laboratory for Particle Physics and home to a hugely ambitious particle-smashing project to unravel the fundamental laws of nature, hailed the feat as a milestone.
It would bring closer researchers' final goal of abolishing distance and making collaboration between scientists around the world efficient and effectively instantaneous, he said.
Harvey Newman of Caltech, another of the world's major research centres, said the achievement boosted hopes that systems operating at 10 gigabits per second "will be commonplace in the relatively near future."
Recovered Alien CD from Roswell crash www.artbell.com
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U.S. moves
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Quantum Computing Gets Five Photons Closer
Quantum computers,
which use attributes of quantum particles like atoms and photons to
represent data, promise to solve certain very large problems many
orders of magnitude faster than is possible using today's computers.
The challenge is being able to manipulate particles well enough to
carry out computing. A key step is being
able to entangle five particles, which would make it possible to check
computations for errors and teleport quantum information within and
between computers. Researchers from the
University of Science and Technology of China, the University of
Innsbruck in Austria, and the University of Heidelberg in Germany have
entangled five photons. Error correction uses
mathematical codes to detect when a bit has been accidentally flipped,
and is widely used in classical computing because electronic and
magnetic bits occasionally switch accidentally from a 1 to a 0 or vice
versa. Quantum bits are more delicate and require an error correction
method to be feasible. The researchers used
the five-photon entanglement process to carry out open-destination
teleportation, which makes it possible to transmit information to any
one of several processors within a quantum computer or nodes in a
quantum network. Quantum teleportation is akin to faxing a document
and in the process destroying the original. It will be more than
a decade before the technology is practical, according to the
researchers. The work appeared in the July 1, 2004 issue of Nature. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/08/rnb_083004.asp?trk=nl
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| Intel
Announces Milestone in Shrinking Chips
By
MATTHEW FORDAHL SAN JOSE, Calif. (AP)
-- Contradicting fears that the semiconductor industry's pace of
development is slowing, Intel Corp. announced it has achieved a
milestone in shrinking the size of transistors that will power its
next-generation chips.
The Santa Clara,
Calif.-based company said Monday it has created a fully functional 70
megabit memory chip with transistor switches measuring just 35
nanometers -- about 30 percent smaller than those found on today's
state-of-the-art chips.
By shrinking the size
of the transistors and other features etched into the silicon, more of
the tiny devices can be squeezed onto a single chip. As a result,
microprocessors become more powerful and memory chips can store more
data without growing in size.
"Intel continues
to meet the increasing challenges of scaling by innovating with new
materials, processes and device structures," said Sunlin Chou,
general manager of Intel's Technology and Manufacturing Group.
Intel said products
built with its 65-nanometer process technology -- a label that
describes the average size of the minuscule chip features -- are on
track for delivery in 2005.
If so, it would be in
keeping with a famous forecast by Intel founder Gordon Moore, who in
the late 1960s predicted the number of transistors on a chip would
roughly double every two years. "Moore's Law," as the
prediction, is now known, has held true since then.
Intel and other
semiconductor companies have thrived on the ability to pack more
performance into their chips. But with each generation, it becomes
increasingly difficult to maintain the pace as the tinier and tinier
transistors test the physical limits of silicon.
"As we scale to
smaller dimensions, our job gets tougher," said Mark Bohr, an
Intel senior fellow.
In fact, chips built
with the current 90 nanometer process technology saw several delays
from many chip manufacturers as they struggled with issues such as
heat and power dissipation.
For its next
generation chips, Intel said it incorporated new materials and other
technologies to work around the problems.
The company also
developed so-called sleep transistors that shut off the electrical
current to areas of a chip that aren't being used. As a result, power
consumption drops -- something that will decrease heat generation and
help battery-powered devices last longer between charges. http://www.technologyreview.com/articles/04/08/ap_083004.asp?trk=nl |
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computer geeks since
al gore invented
the
internet
The
challenge to maintaining Moore's law down to molecular scale 
