News Researchers develop all-optical 'transistor'

"positioned in such a way that the gap between them is the same as the wavelength of the light"
Surely this means you cant shrink each unit smaller than this gap.
uv light goes to 10nm, not very small.

 

Graphene will be mainstream before this gets out the lab - that's how far off this tech is.

Light beams are too fat right now a real optical cpu die would be massive compared to todays, it's interesting tech and I am interested to see how it develops, because there's lots of benefits to using light, they just need to work on making the beams smaller at same time.

 

"But gamma ray photons are 10 picometres"
what would my case be made of to stop it killing me?

 

do i see light at the end of the tunnel?

 

Ok, i thought that after uv, the smaller you go, the more damage it does to you.
If GH says it's safe that's good enough for me.

 

Take care when overclocking, because you won't like me when i'm angry

 

I spat my drink reading this one....brilliant!!

 

I always find it amusing whenever these physics tech articles appear. There's always a string of comments from people who think they're more knowledgeable than the scientists in question and it invariably goes along the lines of... "it won't work because......."

 

But even so, why would you need a particularly small CPU die for this? In silicon microelectronics, the whole design is planar, so having a small CPU die is necessary to fit a large number of transistors in. But with light, little to no heat is produced, so the same circuit could be stacked on multiple layers. So even though in a single layer you might only have, say, 30% of the 'transistors' of a comparable silicon CPU, you would have many thousands of layers.

 

Plus with this new tech you could build cpu's in 3D, stacking layer upon layer. This could lead to CPU's that need no/very little in the way of active cooling while being lightyears (pun intended) ahead of anything we have today.Technology has advanced to the level where we can produce things on a molecular level, just imagine the gaming computer of 50 years from now.....

 

Graphene is a red herring. Whilst a lot of money is being pushed by governments desperate not to be left out, there has been little real world CPU applicable advances.

 

And the gamma-ray deflecting mirrors at this scale would be made of what ?

 

Once again it does not have the be gamma. IE:

(I've always wanted to use that one )

 

Hold on chewy were gonna overclock the nuts off this.

 

The wave length that springs to mind for me are X-rays as they are in commonly used already, and X-rays range from 0.01 to 10 nm

 

don't forget that these gamma rays would be low power so it will not penetrate the chip walls. also there are only a few photons per mirror.
if the frequency is higher than the penetration is less that why infra red is line of sight and wifi isn't.
the dangerous gamma rays from a nuclear reactor are really high energy there are many at once.