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FRS 119
Fall 2005
working schedule
reading
assignments
BEYOND SILICON: The Future(s) of Computers We all expect computers to get faster and better every few months. Gordon E. Moore proposed, in 1965, that, roughly speaking, silicon chips will double in computing power every year and a half. His prediction is now called ``Moore's Law'', and it has held true with remarkable regularity for the past forty years. But there are good reasons why it cannot continue much beyond 2020. At some point, the transistors on a chip will need to become smaller than atoms, or the heat they generate will cause an explosion, or signals will need to travel faster than light. What then? What will computers be like, and how will they work, twenty, or fifty years into the future? In this seminar, we will explore the fundamental limits placed on computation by physical laws, and new ways to compute that are now being explored seriously by scientists and engineers. These include computers that exploit the weirdness of quantum mechanics, the tiny size and flexibility of DNA molecules, the speed of light waves, or the direct medical applications of living cells. |
Ken Steiglitz ken@cs.princeton.edu Schedule: Wednesday, 1:30-4:20 p.m. Guest Lecturers: Dr. Bernard Yurke: DNA implementation of addition, October 12. Prof. David August: The general area of parallelism, November 9. Prof. Stephen Lyon: Physical implementation of quantum computing, November 30. Prof. Ron Weiss: Computation using living cells, December 7. |