Problem: Moore’s law won’t continue forever. Transistors are now so small that they have reached the quantum scale and it will simply not be physically possible to make them smaller.
Solution: Many people have proposed optical computing as the next technology to continue Moore’s Law because photons move several orders of magnitude faster than electrons, do not lose energy while moving. Prashant Jain and his colleagues have developed an optical transistor – a device that could serve as the underlying logic gate for optical computing.
3 or 4 charges in a nanoparticle or quantum dot can convert it from a semiconductor to a metal antenna. Nanoparticle antenna for communication and semiconductor for the computation.
Technology that might make it possible: The optical transistor is built using doped metal nanoparticles that absorb and emit photons at specific frequencies of light when a voltage potential is applied.
More at SolveforX.com.
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Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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