10-30-2006, 05:40 PM
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Sage of Wisdom
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Location: Within Midnight
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Photon Computers
Quote:
Tech: Photon computers a bright idea
Sean McClure, The Gateway (University of Alberta)
EDMONTON — With no mass and all energy, photons, the particles of which light is composed, are the fastest things around, traveling almost 300,000 kilometres each second. They’re able to carry massive amounts of information across huge distances, racing through cables made of glass.
In the future, our personal computers may use photons to process and move information at impressive speeds.
The concept of a computer that runs on light is often called an “all-optical computer,” and the advantages over today’s electronic systems could be significant.
Mark Summers, an electrical and computer engineering graduate student at the University of Alberta, is working in a field called photonics: the technology concerned with the moving and storing of information using light. His work could one day lead to computers that run on photons, replacing the electrons that today’s computers depend on.
“The photon can be thought of as an ideal information carrier, superior to the electron in terms of transmitting data,” Summers said. “In optics, you overcome the problems associated with heat dissipation, and you can fit a lot more information at particular wavelengths in the same amount of space.”
Performance in today’s electronic computers is pushed to higher limits by cramming as many components as possible onto a microchip. The more pieces you can get on a chip the more operations you can perform every second.
Electrons, however, like their personal space, and if this space is compromised they begin fighting for territory, which can make things too hot and cause circuits to fail. Photons, on the other hand, don’t mind each other’s company.
Still, getting a computer to run on photons would be a little trickier than simply shooting flashes of light down a tube. The light must be controlled, the way today’s computers control electricity.
Inside your personal computer are miniature on/off switches called transistors that control the flow of electrons by only allowing those with certain energies to move. The other energies fall into a “gap” and aren’t allowed to pass through to other areas of the machine.
In nature, highly ordered patterns in the translucent wings of certain insects cause parts of the sun’s white light to be filtered out. The remaining energies are scattered back to our eyes, which we see as a display of vibrant colours. Summers is fabricating what are known as photonic crystals. These structures are also highly ordered and possess a gap where certain energies of light are unable to propagate through the material.
Using a process called glancing angle deposition (GLAD), Summers fashions these materials out of silicon. The technique uses a beam of high-energy electrons to transfer silicon atoms to a flat surface at an oblique angle, forming a highly ordered structure.
“The process grows isolated columns which look like a field of grass,” Summers said. “We use complex computer-controlled substrate motion algorithms to nano-engineer a complicated three-dimensional architecture inside the columnar film.”
In other words, a fair amount of theory and computation would be needed to get the final structure just right.
In the near future, photonic crystals will most likely be used for simple applications such as frequency filters or light-directing devices. However, an all-optical computer is the ultimate dream for many. Only time will tell if the idea remains solely in the realm of imagination, or eventually finds itself in the hands of everyday users.
Canadian University Press
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Well, if this technology is readily accessible in the near future, I guess we can see a whole new generation of super-computers, personal computers, and possibly even gaming systems.
Heck, over the last three decades, technologies have advanced so fast that new stuff is coming out every three to four years, possibly even less than that.
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