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Computer developers are obsessed with speed and power, constantly looking for ways to promote faster processing and more main memory in a smaller area. IBM, for example, devised a new manufacturing process (called a silicon insulator) that has the effect of increasing the speed of a chip and reducing its power consumption. These chips released in 2001 are 30% faster.
DSP Chips: Processors for the Post-PC Era
Millions of people may be familiar with the “Intel Inside” slogan that draws attention to the primary brand of microprocessor used in microcomputers. But you probably don’t know that you are more likely to spend your day using other types of chip digital signal processors (DSPs), integrated circuits designed for high-speed data manipulation, manufactured primarily by Texas Instruments but also by Lucent, Motorola, and Analog communications and image manipulation. Manufactured primarily by devices, DSPs are designed to manipulate digital signals in voice, music, and video, which is why they are found in pagers, cell phones, cars, hearing aids, and even washing machines.
Digital signal processing is present in only a fifth of the size of the $ 21 billion microprocessor business. But in most of the post-PC era, communications devices and the Internet, which need to handle huge flows of real-world information, such as sounds and images, are expected to supplant the personal computer. Therefore, in 10 years it is possible that DSPs will outsell microprocessors.
Nanotechnology
Nanotechnology, nanoelectronics, nanostructures, they all start with a measurement known as a nanometer. A nanometer is one billionth of a meter, which means that we are operating at the level of atoms and molecules. A human hair is approximately 100,000 nanometers in diameter.
In nanotechnology, molecules are used to create small machines to store data and perform tasks. Experts try to do nanofabrication by building small nanostructures, one atom or molecule at a time. When applied to chips and other electronic devices, the field is called nanoelectronics.
Today, scientists are trying to simulate the on / off of traditional transistors by creating transistor switches that manipulate a single electron, the subatomic particle that is the fundamental unit of electricity. In theory, a trillion of these electrons could be placed on a chip the size of a fingernail. Scientists have already forged layers of individual molecules into tiny computer components in devices called chemically assembled electronic devices, or CAEN. These machines would be billions of times more powerful than today’s personal computers.
CAEN components are expected to be operational within 10 years. But computer makers are already reaping some benefits from nanotechnology, which is being used to build read / write heads for hard drives, improving the speed with which computers can access data.
Optical computing
Today’s computers are electronic, tomorrow’s computers can be optical or optoelectronic that use light, not electricity. With optical technology, a machine using lasers, lenses, and mirrors would render data on / off codes with pulses of light.
Light is much faster than electricity. In fact, fiber optic networks, consisting of hair-thin glass fibers instead of copper cables, can move information at speeds 3000 times faster than conventional networks. However, the signals get stuck when they have to be processed by silicon chips. Optical chips would eliminate the bottleneck. (Someday, theoretically, it is conceivable that computers could operate even faster than the speed of light. For generations, physicists thought that nothing was faster than light moving in a vacuum at about 300,000 miles per second.)
DNA computing
Potentially, biotechnology could be used to grow cultures of bacteria that, when exposed to light, emit a small electrical charge, for example. The properties of the biochip could be used to represent the digital on / off signals used in computing. Or a strand of synthetic DNA could represent information as a pattern of molecules, and the information could be manipulated by subjecting it to precisely designed chemical reactions that could mark or elongate the strand. For example, instead of using binaries, you could manipulate all four nucleic acids, which promises to process large numbers. This is a totally non-digital way of thinking about computing.
Imagine millions of nanomachines growing from microorganisms that process information at the speed of light and send it out over long-range pathways. What kinds of changes could we expect with computers like that?
Quantum computing
Sometimes called the “ultimate computer,” the quantum computer is based on quantum mechanics, the theory of physics that explains the erratic world of the atom. Whereas a common computer stores information as zeros and ones represented by electrical currents or voltages that are high or low, a quantum computer stores information through the use of elementary particle states. Scientists envision using the energized and relaxed states of individual atoms to represent data. For example, hydrogen atoms could be made to turn off and on like transistors in a conventional computer by going from low-energy (off) states to high-energy (on) states.
Other possibilities: Molecular and point computers
In the molecular computer, the silicon transistor is replaced with a single molecule. In the point computer, the transistor is replaced by a single electron. These approaches, such as the mass production of atomic cables and insulators. There are no visible prototypes yet.