An idea that would probably never be possible...

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magician13134
 
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An idea that would probably never be possible...

Post by magician13134 »

The other day I was thinking about how transistors have really hit the smallest they can be, and although we aren't using those sizes in home electronics yet, it's going to happen eventually that we will no longer be able to get electronics smaller with the current technology.
Anyway... I had an idea that most likely won't work, but with only honors physics below my belt, I can't see any flaws with it :) (except for the fact that I'm not smart enough to come up with any ideas about how it work actually WORK... :wink:)
So instead of decreasing size, this would just increase the storage capacity of atomic-sized components. Correct me if I'm wrong, but transistors are put to use in devices such as RAM where they act as a switch, or a binary 0 or 1, right? So what if they could be more than a 0 or 1? What if they could hold thousands of bits? So that's what this idea is about, although it's VERY vague, just the premature form of an idea, really. So what it is, is simply a small bit of three small blocks of elements or compounds that would work together in a certain way, so electricity could only flow in one direction. Then electric pulses of a certain frequency would be sent into the far group on one side, and this would somehow be 'recorded' by this component, that's where I don't know how it would work... Maybe one of the elements would resonate, and when it was electrically charged, it would change resonation frequencies... Then when electricity was sent to the middle of the three blocks in the group, it 'play back' this pulse... again... somehow... And this could store many different values...

Wow, that looks seems even more ridiculous when written out than it does in my head, but this certainly makes no sense, so I'll post it here, seems to fit in :)
Should I start preparing the speech for my Nobel prize now? :)

koolkat
 
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Post by koolkat »

I'll bet you that they are working on something similar to this in MIT ;-)

The_Don125
 
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Post by The_Don125 »

I'm not 100% certain on this, but I think that you just described quantum computing. Granted, quantum computers are quite massive right about now, but they operate with values from 0 to 1 if I recall.

niksun
 
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Post by niksun »

Quantum computers behave similarly. A bit is replaced by a qubit which has the interesting property of not simply being "on" or "off," but rather varying degrees of both. So, in a sense, it can be both on and off simultaneously, but with varying probabilities. It ties in very well to fuzzy logic as is typically introduced in Artificial Intelligence classes at the senior undergraduate level.

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macegr
 
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Post by macegr »

There's also mechanical and analog computing, which deal with ratiometric and continuously varying properties. Other schemes such as trinary logic have been explored as well.

woody1189
 
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Post by woody1189 »

have any of you heard of the recent discovery of the memristor? theres a wikipedia page for it already. it was theorized back in the day but hp made a working one in the spring. its essentially a resistor that automatically changes its resistance based on certain factors. what this means is that computers of tomorrow wont need to be booted up, they will be able to just be turned off and turned on from the same point because the resistance will remember the state the computer was previously in.

i can't wait for some through hole versions to play with. :twisted:

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westfw
 
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Post by westfw »

Intel and several other flash memory vendors currently offer multi-level flash memory that stores more than one bit in each memory cell...

hgds
 
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yehh....

Post by hgds »

We will develop better technology.

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