Nanotechnology and Computing Speed: Part II

Last issue I was fawning over HP’s potential release of the Fourth Passive Circuit technology, the memristor, for computers by next year. This issue isn’t exactly as directly beneficial to consumers as the memristor advance, but it’s equally revolutionary and significant in its own geeky kind of way.

As most of you know, the fastest information superhighway out there is fiber-optic cable. With fiber optics, you can send information at the speed of light. There’s also less heat resistance and, therefore, faster speed than cable. Plus, it’s a lot more information dense than cable, so you can pack a lot more into a small space.

Another top feature is that it doesn’t discriminate between data and content the way cable does, which means you don’t need separate cables, converters, etc., on either end of the wire. Fiber-optic cable just ships the stuff and lets the router do the work—this connects to the TV, this to the computer, this to the phone.

The one place in this info network that’s always slowed things down a bit is where all this info, carried by light, has to be converted to an electrical pulse. This conversion and reconversion slows down signal processing by a factor of 1,000. That means, if you can keep the optic pulse as an optic pulse, you can exponentially increase data speed through networks; you’d be able to move 1,000 more pieces of information through the same cable.

Until now, the prime difficulty in designing an all-optical network router was finding a means to temporarily store or buffer the packets of information. Researchers have recently proposed a variety of methods to completely stop light, but they weren’t very “real world” focused. Some used cryogenic temperatures; some weren’t solid-state compatible; some were simply unstable even on the lab bench.

But recently a couple guys have developed a metamaterial (a material that gains its properties from its structure, not its composition) that can stop light, creating the ability to store or buffer the information on the network.

Again, the implications here are that the extant, growing fiber-optic network will be able to carry huge amounts of data and deliver them faster than before. It also means technology, such as wireless data networks, will be able to handle much more data traffic, making a wireless world much more feasible and affordable.

Granted, this isn’t out of the labs yet. But it's one more indication of what you can do when you manipulate materials at the atomic level.

If you think that story is cool, this piece notes how electrons in a quantum state take the behavior of photons—or to regular folk, the point where electricity starts acting like light. It’s a lot more exciting for geek world than real world at this point, but once again, without nanotech, these kinds of things aren’t even observable, much less opportunities off which to build new technologies.

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