Guest post by What’s after electrical charges and electricity in computer storage? Lasers and excitons. Theorists from the John Hopkins University have drafted a theory that uses low-power lasers and crystalline insulators to store data. In the theory, lasers would excite electrons in a crystalline-like lattice in order to record data; the atoms would vibrate at a certain frequency to indicate the type of bit. A side effect of using lasers and insulators is reduced heat output. The heat is reduced because the atoms do not exchanging electrons as current computer components do. The EE Times has a more detailed write up as well as WebIndia, TopNews.in, Eureka Alert, and Small Times.
I’m not a physicist, but when looking over this article, some of the physics seemed off to me… that plus seeing one or two of the classic signs of charlatanism make me wonder.
Sorry for the pessimism.
Optical chips? Pah! Everybody knows the future lies with Atom Chips! http://www.osnews.com/story/13216/What_About_Atom_Chip_
Correct. You’re not a physicist. Your skepticism could have been and most certainly has been the same skepticism since we discovered electronconductivity across the entire Periodic Table, let alone across the varying types of crystalline lattice structures that Material Science Engineering and Physical Chemistry continue to develop/understand that sits dormant in plain sight.
Well I am a physicist, an optical physicist in fact and I can tell you that all this talk of optical computers is pretty much rubbish. The effect these guys discovered is quite nice, and might even be useful, however, we are not going to use it in optical computers. There might be a need for doing some logic all optical, but optical computers are a step back not forward, both in terms of power consumption and size. In order to do all-optical logic, you need powers in at least the milliwatt range, compared to nano or subnano Watts for electronic logic. Secondly, the size, waveguides for light are a few micrometres in diameter, have fun building a chip from that.
Generally, all this talk about optical computers is sensationalism.
Cheers
Jochen
Good Morning, Dave
They had “crystals” in SciFi flicks and books forever as data storage and the like. Slowly becoming true… (even if this is just crap, there have been other researchers and talks about crystals and storage)
This is very nice, I’m sure for certain high-end, memory intensive supercomputing applications, but here on my desktop, the thing what’s making all the heat is the CPU, not the RAM.
Whenever I read this stuff, I find it hard to get interested, knowing that I’m never really going to understand it and probably won’t see anything come of it for the best part of a decade, if ever. It all sounds great, I just don’t know what to do with this information.
What can be made into memory can be made into logic gates as well. Think about it a moment – a memory cell is a logic gate with but two functions: x = constant; and return x. Making logic elements will take more structures, but isn’t any harder to make than memory.