A Device Made of Nothing

[Alan C. Lawhon]

It's been quite a while since I've been active on FAH and here in the forums, but I'm back to folding and quite happy to be crunching work units on a new computer. (I've also recruited a new member and even started a new team!) I've ran across an IEEE "Spectrum" article (originally linked from Slashdot) which might have future application to FAH. Following is the text of a message I've posted to some friends on another message board concerning a new breakthrough in the area of semiconductor technology.

Look at the "Authors Note" at the end of this article:

http://spectrum.ieee.org/semiconductors ... of-nothing

It appears that this promising "breakthrough" discovery is/was due to a bit of serendipity. The researchers were probably trying to make progress in one area, (i.e. developing high-reliability electronics for operation in the vacuum of deep space), and stumbled upon a "Eureka!" type epiphany. (I wonder what the reaction of Gordon Moore and the people at Intel was when they read this article? Let me guess: "Why didn't we think of that!" accompanied by a slap on the forehead.)

The NASA scientists concede that a lot of work still remains to be done, but think of this: Most of the CPUs in our home computers run in the neighborhood of 2-3 Ghz clock speeds. According to the IEEE article, the researchers have already developed a prototype device that operates at 470 Ghz. It will take (maybe) 5-10 years for this new technology to be perfected and begin showing up in actual commercial products, but think what this is going to do in the way of "speeding up" computation? (Having typical home computer multi-core CPUs running at several hundred GHz clock speeds should be a huge boost for the Folding@Home project - as well as other CPU-intensive type applications. That's just one application where this could be very beneficial.)

I wonder if these two NASA scientists will wind up winning the Nobel Prize for physics?