Future Computing Models - An Introduction

In the history of computing, the first digital computing devices occupied rooms as they were designed by using thousands of vacuum tubes as the basic operational unit. As the semiconductor electronics technology gets matured, the computers have been made with smaller basic units such as transistors. This advancement resulted in very smaller machines that fit in a box the size of a hardcover book, but thousands of times more powerful than the original ones. Engineers can now squeeze 100 million transistors on a slice of silicon chip. That is miniscule.

The advantages of producing smaller machines are manifold. The smaller the computer the less electricity is used, the more power it has, and the cheaper it is to make. But further reduction in size of transistors is facing a lot of difficulties as the chip fabrication technology such as lithography is approaching its ultimate limit. Even if there is any evolutionary technique in chip making process, the size of transistor will attain ultimately the size of an atom. Thus having realized the need of figurating an absolutely revolutionary technology to achieve the goal of accomplishing further shrinkage in the size of the basic units, the researchers started to work on realizing molecules as the basic computational unit as transistors do for digital computers today. This resulted in a couple of promising computing models, such as quantum computing and DNA-based Computing.

Click for Revolutionary Computing Page

Back to My Home Page