- Computer running a little slow?
Take a laser to it.
(upbeat techno music)
Almost 50 years ago,
Gordon Moore made an observation.
He saw that you could fit about twice as many
transistors on a computer chip every one or two years.
It was such a great observation,
we made it in to a law, Moore's Law,
and what a great law it's been.
Every 18 months or so you got twice as much going on
a computer chip as you did before.
But is today's smartphone twice as functional
as a smartphone from two years ago?
Probably not.
It turns out there's an important parallel to Moore's Law
called Dennard Scaling.
Now this says as transistors shrink,
the current and voltage necessary to make them work
should scale at the same rate.
And for a long time, this held true.
It's sort of like doubling your income
but you only have to pay the same amount of taxes
as you did before,
or eating twice as much but you burn twice as many calories
while sticking to the same exercise routine.
Sounds great, right?
Well, you know what they say,
if it sounds too good to be true.
By the mid 2000s, transistors had shrunk down
to 90 nanometers.
That's 90 billionths of a meter.
Now below the size you start to run in to some problems
with electrical current leakage,
making the chips less efficient.
So today a more fitting analogy would be fitted sheets.
Let's say you got a really tight fitted sheet
and you gotta put it on an enormous mattress,
but every time you pull down on one corner,
another one pops loose.
You see, electrical leaks, well,
that means that you have an increase in heat.
An increase in heat means the chance of a system failure,
so you need to add some form of cooling element,
like a fan in your laptop.
But these require their own power source,
which means that the price of the chip goes up,
and that could mean that a chip never even makes it
to market.
Now engineers have been working on
getting around this problem in small ways,
but for all intensive purposes,
Dennard's dead.
(bell ringing)
Well, actually, technically he's still alive and well,
but his scaling, not so much.
Does this mean that the pace of computer processing
will slow to a crawl?
Have we reached peak iPhone?
Not necessarily.
The solution may come in the form of nanophotonics.
You use optical signals,
essentially light,
which are capable of carrying more data
than electromagnetic impulses.
But it's only been recent that scientists have been able
to incorporate both optical and electrical elements
on the same transistor.
This could lead to the holy grail of computing,
a supercomputer capable of performing at the same level
as the human brain.
And I know, reality television makes you think
human brains aren't that special,
but they totally are.
They're capable of performing one million trillion
calculations in a second,
which is called an exaflop.
Exaflop.
Just that word alone tells me the human brain
is pretty amazing.
Nanophotonics could also lead to improvements
in space communication,
which traditionally we use radio waves for.
And those are fine,
but NASA always has to be careful to avoid interference
during transmissions.
Using lasers would get around that problem.
Plus, you can pack in a ton more data
in a laser transmission than a radio wave transmission,
Which means we could use some more of our data heavy
instruments that we have.
Well I have a question for all of you this week.
It looks like nanophotonics could preserve Moore's Law
indefinitely,
but are there any other technological trends
that you think are in danger of plateauing?
Let us know in the comments below.
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(techno music)