To those who claim that Moore's law is approaching its end I would point them to Wednesday's issue of the journal "Nature". IBM researchers report they have developed an optical replacement for the transistor that operates at room temperature, requires no cooling because it approaches the quantum theoretical limit on energy efficiency, and is about 1000 times faster than any existing transistor. More work will be required before an entire microprocessor can be made using these devices but I find this development to be enormously encouraging.
The reason it's so energy efficient is that it only takes one photon from a very weak laser to switch a far more powerful laser on and off. And besides acting as a switch it can also act as an amplifier by boosting the intensity of a laser beam by a factor of 23,000. Single-photon nonlinearity at room temperature <https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-021-03866-9> John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> 42h -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv0FRNoq%3DPAKKp6FWZoqi01OEPfvFXBUfBZmxSxWD-Q7rQ%40mail.gmail.com.
