Technology breakthrough

[L2_1989]

A technological breakthrough was made on June 1. Check it out.

http://www.cbc.ca/story/science/national/2005/06/01/transistor-molecular050601.html

[Toucan]

Wow, a million times less power required, that is just amazing, god only know's what they will make out of this



Edit: Well its not science fiction anymore, Quantum Mechanics has finaly arrived

[op6]

Wow, its amazing what they can do. Too bad it'll be a while before this is used by everyday people.

[DragonPaladin]

Sounds like the forerunner of nano-technology.

[Modred]

Sounds like the forerunner of nano-technology.
Nanomachines have been in use for several years. This is just a new way of providing efficient electricity. Of course, it can be used to make nanomachines even smaller, but we'll see where it goes.

[Mindslaver]

Wow, its amazing what they can do. Too bad it'll be a while before this is used by everyday people.
Except for cost-effectiveness, I doubt that there would be any factors running against the mass production of this invention. Producers could easily insert it into their products, and the consumers would only notice a positive effect.

[Protoss_Honor]

Dude that is cool. nanotransitiors. Quantum Mechanics. All those things you read about in sci-fi books are starting to come true. How cool is that?

[Modred]

Think about the applications of this. What's the average life for an mp3 player? Anywhere from 10 to 50+ hours probably. If all the circuits were replaced by these low powered transistors that perform the same work with 1/1000000 the energy, you could go for weeks, maybe years, without recharging or replacing batteries.

And what about the applications for computers? Smaller hard drives, video cards, etc., all of which use less electricity than current models. Imagine fitting the power of a cutting edge modern desktop computer into a slim-lined laptop that required little to no cooling and had a battery life of days, not hours.

[Toucan]

Alot in the field are predicting that computers will go solar in about 20 years just like the old solar calculators (remember them, still got 1?), all thanx to this new technolagy


Edit:, Imagine that, a computer you dont need to plug in at all, the light in a room being more than enough to run it.

[bluemicrobyte]

Imagine that, a computer you dont need to plug in at all, the light in a room being more than enough to run it.

......YOU ARE CRAZY!

What ever happened to Doom 3 in the dark?

And what about my computer which is nestled in it's own little PITCH BLACK cabinet?

[Toucan]

......YOU ARE CRAZY! :P Well, Yeah, alot of people tell me that, but seriously, thats how low there power requirements will be and how cool they will run. People will still build there pcs to look and run how they want them to.

I mean it is using 1 million times less power, so it will be a million times cooler as well, so chips can be cooler and much much faster.

This a huge break through, normally it takes around a million electrons to change the state of a switch in a cpu or any chipset, these switch's change state with just 1 electron, its amazing.

[hammocksleeper]

Yeah so this is a pretty cool thing, no doubt about it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be a million times faster. Take hard drives for example, they have physical components that are limited by the mechanics of them, and not by electronics. There's all kinds of other stuff like that.

Also, I've been meaning to ask, I don't know if anyone knows the answer though, what about stray current that could affect the transistors? I mean, it proabably seemed an improbable situation before, but with these one-elctron transistors I'm sure it's much more of a possibility of outside influence affecting the behavior of the transistors.

[Toucan]

Hard drives are on death row, I assure you, for that matter so is modular ram, but that is another story.

The question of stray eelectrons causing problems,is a damn good one, insulation of the unit will be paramount, the old "hair dryer effect" would be devastating if the unit was not well insulated.
Dont forget it is also running on 1 million times less power, so chances of electrons path arcing within the chip is also reduced, so internal disruption is unlikely, but you cant deny that if it is frequency influenced, it will start out buggy as all hell
XT days revisited, the old 386 or 486 (I still have a working 486) :D

[Modred]

Yeah so this is a pretty cool thing, no doubt about it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that everything will be a million times faster.
Faster, no; smaller and lighter, yes.

And you raise a good question about interference. Something using so little power for such a vital function, as in one electron switches the transistor, what is today negligible could drain the power away from something using this technology.

[Toucan]

It is impossible that this technolagy will not make a processor faster, for a transister to use 1 million electrons it has to have room with in it, for 1 million electrons to moves
A transister that uses only 1 electron only needs room for 1 electron.
now electrons DO NOT move at the speed of light, the distance they travel and the time it takes for them to travel is always a big concern.
So what your saying to me, reducing the distance electrons need to travel 1 million times is not going to speed things up?, reducing the space between switch's has always sped things up before and we have never been able to decrease that space so much before.
What is it you think dictates the speed of your cpu?

[Modred]

He didn't say processors. Besides, processors are already increadibly small. But hard drives are different. As long as there are mechanical parts, such as the physical disks, the speed of that device depends on those mechanical parts which are much slower than electricity.

This could decrease transfer time for a device, but it wouldn't greatly improve the performace of mechanical parts. Now, if everything were goverened by electricity, this would enable us to make a computer smaller than a current laptop with much more power than a current desktop. This new transistor will push us in that direction, but won't get us there.

[Toucan]

Modred, every switch (and there are millions of them) inside of your CPU takes about a million electrons to change state, jump up, jump down, that's how many electrons it takes to throw a switch and that is that. (You cant change the law's of physics with current technolagy)
These switch's (and that is all they are "Switch's", just like every other switch in your CPU) change state with only 1 electron, the switch itself is only 1 atom in size (quite simply 1 atom changing the state of another) present cpu switch's are about 2 million atoms in size.
how is that not a reduction in size?

[Modred]

Toucan, you are not responding to what we've said. I said there is a limitation on size and speed of devices with mehcanical parts, not that they wouldn't benefit at all from this technology.

[Toucan]

It will be about 10-20 years untill this technolagy is implemented in the home pc.
By that time HDD and memory moduals will have gone in favor of holographic memorys that are both larger and faster than both. (basicly the "step" of the HDD will be eliminated, everything will be stored in a kind of RAM state at all times)
Couple that with new cpu's made from this new technolagy and I think you will have a damn fine home pc :)

[Whiteknight]

Woo! Go U of A(lberta) (...Canada, for those more ignorant). This is a major breakthrough to much more efficient, smaller computers.

[Fenguin]

If you couple these transistors with circuit boards printed with Bose-Einstein condensates, you could make computers even more efficient.