Author: Mike Byrne
Date: 14:55:54 04/19/05
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On April 18, 2005 at 20:50:52, Mark Ryan wrote: >http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4449711.stm > >"But when Moore's Law is effectively slowed down in about 10 to 20 years' time >..." > >A few years ago, Grandmaster Lev Alburt stated that chess computers would never >be stronger than the strongest humans. If there is a practical (or asymptotic) >limit to computer speed, maybe he was right. > >(Disclaimer: I realize that chess strength is not just about speed, but it is >certainly a contributing factor.) It is my opinion, that over the next 50 years, there could be a significant discovery that ultimately could make intergrated circuits virtually obsolete. Perhaps it may be something along these lines I found on the web " NANOTECHNOLOGY Molecular nanotechnology, a concept first articulated by Eric Drexler in the early 1980s, is the controlled manipulation of matter at the atomic and molecular levels to create new products with atom-by-atom precision. Engineers now manipulate matter at the atomic level, carving out 1-atom-deep "molecular corrals" and fabricating 1-10 nm scale "suspension bridges," "guitar strings," wires, magnets and bearings. (Complex biomolecules like insulin and hemoglobin are compact natural nanomachines about 2-3 nm in size.) The Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) and the Scanning Tunneling Microscope (STM) permit the precise positioning of individual atoms. The newest machines cut the time required to etch 1-nm lines to seconds. In 1992, researchers at Harvard University used an AFM to perform nanomachining operations on a molybdenum trioxide crystal. Using an applied load of 100 nanonewtons at the tip, they milled a triangular-shaped 50-nm part from the crystal, then slid the part 200 nm across the worksurface. "Nanoparts" with features as narrow as 10 nm can be machined this way. Smaller nanoparts can be constructed chemically. Recently, Professor T. Ross Kelly and his colleagues at Boston College created a "paddlewheel" molecule (a spinning propeller-shaped wheel) with a built-in brake. In solution, the wheel spins freely. When chemists add mercury ions, the brake trips, stopping the rotation. When they remove the mercury, the wheel resumes spinning . Nanoparts can also be hooked together chemically. Last year two British chemists created a self-assembling molecule consisting of five interlocked rings (five nanoparts) averaging 75 atoms per ring, arranged in the shape of the Olympic logo. This is the largest mechanically-interlocked molecule synthesized to date. In a few years it will be possible to construct complex nanoparts consisting of a few thousand atoms, on a timescale of days. Once we get more proficient at building nanoparts, we can put a few hundred of them together to build the first nanotools consisting of millions of atoms, much like the hypothetical manipulator arm (good for nanoassembly work). Nanoparts may also be assembled into nanomechanical logic devices. We can use 1-nm sliding diamond rods to build gates (Figure 5A) and registers (Figure 5B) with 0.1-nanosecond switching speeds.* These devices could be combined to make programmable logic arrays with >1 GHz clock speeds. Drexler's benchmark nanocomputer with 100,000 logic rods, 10,000 registers, power supplies, etc. occupies a cube 400 nm on a side, weighs 10-7 micrograms, and computes at 1 billion ops/sec (0.001 teraflops) [* Nanoelectronic systems should be much faster. The ultimate: A "nanooptical" computer limited by quantum theory to a clock speed of 1014 transitions/sec, a mid-infrared frequency at 0.4 eV, about 10% of carbon-carbon bond energy. Attempting to clock faster than this would start tearing apart the switches. Note that a "nanooptical" computer is made of human-equivalent gates!] How soon might we be able to build Drexler's mechanical nanocomputer? Figure 6 shows the evolution of data processing power per unit volume over the last 100 years. Drexler's design represents a computing power density of 5 x 1029 bits/sec/cubic meter, assuming 32-bit words. This density should be reached by 2025, but we could see the first simple nanocomputer, performing just 1000 ops/sec in a 100-nm volume, as early as 2015. "
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