Current microchips in computers have a transistor count of more than 1,000 million? That means that the actual chip (inside the black casing called the die) is about the size of my thumbnail and has a billion individual transistors. Each transistor requires several components which make it work like resistors, capacitors and semiconductors. So you can imagine how small the actual components would be. We get pen drives today (also called USB drives) which have capacities of 4 GB meaning that the 1 square cm of the actual chip can store about 4,000,000,000 bytes of data. The entire works of William Shakespeare can be stored in their entirety in less than 500,000 bytes. Everything that Shakespeare wrote in his whole life fits permanently word for word into a drive 2 cm by 6 cm 8,000 times! That’s a lot.
We already have digital response times of picoseconds. A trillion times a second. Wow! That is fast but apparently its not fast enough. The ever increasing demands of today’s software and communication requires even faster more compact chips. But we seem to be heading into a wall. Semiconductors have a finite physical limits of switching circuits even if we reduce their size to near molecular levels. And we have nearly reached it with the present technology. Pretty soon we won’t be able to get more information crammed into lesser space. All these magnetic media, like hard-drives, would reach their threshold even sooner. That leaves only optical components. There is no other way. The storage capacities using light waves is still several orders of magnitude greater than the best we have today. The future belongs to light.
Those of you who have seen the original Superman (Christopher Reeves) would remember the part where Superman goes up to his ‘castle’ on the South Pole. If you can recall the long crystals he uses for storing all his ancestral memories of Krypton, those will be the type of chips we may end up using in the future. And they are not electrically operated, the storage as well as the operation is optical. Same as the technology being developed. So there would be no wires or metals in these machines, only varying lattices from different types of crystals.
Even as the speed of our technology increases, the space requirements will be less. And since we can control light both in terms of intensity as well as frequency, the power requirements of these devices will be reduced in the same ratio as LED based devices to LCD ones. So it’s a win-win situation for the near future. I for one can’t wait to take one of these babies for a ride.
Though it may sound far fetched by today’s standards, it is none-the-less one of the more probable truths of the future. With today’s ever increasing demand of information processing and communication, there is no way the present technology will be able to cope with it successfully. But it doesn’t end there. One day we would have outgrown even the optical technologies because I doubt the human hunger for information will satiate so easily or so soon after our species coming of age. Eventually we will need to reach even further out to the grandest of all computing engines known to humanity – man himself.
Here’s a link on these optical chips
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