Water-based circuit concept switches much faster than semiconductors
newatlas.com
newatlas.com
Sounds like an optical computer much more than a water computer (compared to e.g. microfluidics), and it's much less surprising that an optical switch would switch fast.
Here is some reading I think nay be relevant[0][1][2] but tldr thanks to the miracle of hydrogen bonding, protons/electrons can "transfer" through water by an extremely fast chain reaction of proton association/dissociation - thereby circumventing diffusion as a transfer mechanism.
Laser is a useful interface because lasers can be controlled digitally and provide a convenient way of ionising the solution, but this seems like quite a cool hack exploiting the properties of water to me.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grotthuss_mechanism
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/engineering/grotthuss-m...
I do not think this is going anywhere.
Now if they can make a terrahertz adder out of this... then I'll consider getting excited
It is... someone published a paper on this, and will get to keep his/her tenure in this horrible publish-or-perish world of academia.
The true problem of the publish-or-perish world is the moral hazard that it causes. In booming fields, it is very seductive to abuse statistics or to outright fake data. These are not always caught by peer review!
Picoseconds means under 1000GHz. 1ps would be 1000GHz.
Transistors can switch in picoseconds. The fastest basic bulk silicon ones hundreds of GHz as far as I know. More exotic ones I'm sure could be made a lot faster.
So exactly how much faster is this water based switching device than a transistor? Hopefully the author was not under the impression that transistor switching speed was on the order of CPU clock frequency.
The shortest laser pulses are much shorter than any pulses that can be generated with electronic devices, and they are generated by various optical means.
There are no transistor circuits that go into THz, but only into hundreds of GHz, and at those high frequencies they are not pulse circuits, but amplifiers or oscillators.
A review of potential future transistors that will go into low THz:
For that matter, the laser controlled by other means will not be switched at total discretion, but at a fixed rate. Not different than an oscillator.
Would be mildly surprised if that didn't happen that fast. I guess the interesting twist is that the medium is flowing liquid.
How long does this state last? If one were to, say, write a series of bits into the upstream side of the flow, how many such bits could you recover downstream? The potential I see here is possibly a delay line for THz band signals, not so much the basis for logic for a 1000GHz CPU. But delay lines are darned useful things.
Band name?
The medium that is changing conductivity is water in this case, and it is able to do it much much faster.
That said, the system involves a laser that adds to the ability to switch quickly. "Because the laser pulse is so fast"
Predicted in Rollerball
It looks like this is just "shine a laser at a material to change it, and then use another laser to detect the difference."
"apply a voltage at a device to change it, and then use another voltage to detect the difference (i.e. to detect if a current passes)".
This is an optical switch, like a transistor is an electrical switch. An optical switch that is not very efficient, because the transmission is varied only between 100% and 80%, but one that is very fast.
It can be used in THz range mixers and oscillators.
"Put a voltage over a resistor and use an ammeter to detect the difference"
and make a resistor look like a transistor which it clearly isn't.
"""Because the laser pulse is so fast, the water can switch states in a matter of picoseconds, which are trillionths of a second."""
Although after reading, I must agree that the time-scale feels quite ridiculous!!
(EDIT: RE: "Capacitors can't be logic gates" below - Maybe. But if 1+0=1, and 1+1=2, then surely differentiating 0/1 vs 2 on the output creates an AND gate?)
(I am "posting too fast" with 3 posts in the last hour. Sorry :)
Ok, replace resistor by capacitor :)
I.e., run a current through a capacitor, then (some time later) measure the voltage over it.
I don't recall anyone actually creating logic gates using capacitors only.
In the definition of any controlled switch, e.g. transistor, optical switch or any other kind, it is essential that there are two distinct quantities, e.g. voltages or light beams, one that controls the output state and one that provides power to the output circuit.
A resistor corresponds to a tinted window, not to an optical switch.
Instead of trying to generalize the principle, why don't you explain how you can make logic gates using the technology of the article? And how can you tie these logic gates together without the signal becoming weaker between input and output?
> To replace electronic components with optical ones, an equivalent optical transistor is required. This is achieved using materials with a non-linear refractive index.
Nevertheless, it is unlikely to use such optical switches for logic gates. The most likely application for them is in mixers and oscillators.
There is no impediment for making a complex logic gate by an arbitrary series-parallel connection of the output light beams.
The output of such a logic gate cannot be connected to the input of an identical logic gate, because the input and the output light beams have different frequencies.
This is a problem common for many kinds of optical switches. It is likely that any conversion circuit that could be inserted between two such logic gates would be much slower than them, negating any speed advantage.
This does not really matter, because such optical switches are not intended for making logic circuits.
This in not comparable to transistors in a computer. Transistors use charge (electrons) to switch current (electrons) in order to build boolean gates and logic circuits. Those lasers are probably not optically controlled, and even if they were and could be made into optical logic circuits, their speed will be limited by their size and the speed of light.
I haven't read the article yet, but I can imagine a chip with watercooling microfluidic channels, possibly also used to transmit informations (kind of like hormones in the bloodstream). If it is useful as a computing medium why not?
Would it make a good waveguide too?