Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!uflorida!beach.cis.ufl.edu!seeger
From: seeger@beach.cis.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: TI announcement
Keywords: quantum effect transistor
Message-ID: <19680@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU>
Date: 22 Jan 89 20:18:58 GMT
References: <11462@haddock.ima.isc.com> <5621@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <6944@louie.udel.EDU>
Sender: news@uflorida.cis.ufl.EDU
Reply-To: seeger@beach.cis.ufl.edu (F. L. Charles Seeger III)
Organization: UF EE Dept
Lines: 47

In article <6944@louie.udel.EDU> berryh@udel.EDU (John "Blue" Berryhill) writes:
|>)regions measuring 0.01-0.02 microns and offers the possibility of
|>)switching speeds 1,000 times faster than today's best semiconductor
|>)devices.
|
|While fast transistors are nice, just remember that in order to
|use that speed, you're going to need one heck of an interconnection
|technology.

I'm no physicist, but there seems to be the possibility of quantum
interconnects that exhibit ZERO propogation delays.  The idea is to
create a macroscopic quantum state to interconnect a sender and receiver.
When this quantum state is perturbed enough to jump by the sender, the
state changes instantaneously across its entire extent.  Therefore, the
receiver can detect this change without a speed-of-light delay.  Terry
Clark at the University of Sussex was working on this sort of thing a
few years ago, but I haven't seen anything recently.  Vaguely, a
superconductor is used placed in an RF field to generate the macroscopic
quatum state, and this superconductor can be relatively large (they
were contemplating a linear conductor on the order of a meter long).
This is, I think, in some way related to or derived from work in SQUIDs
(Superconducting QUantum Interference Devices), which are commonly used
for very sensitive measurements of magnetic fields.

If anyone has heard anything about this recently, I'd sure like to hear
about it, including references, if possible.  The "great" UF library has
not been a good place for finding papers about this, though I do have
one in German (I don't read it, and everyone I've found to translate it
wanted a fair bit of money in return).  I'm suspicious that either things
didn't pan out, or else it got classified.

Even so, this approach may not be practical for on-chip interconnect, but
could still be useful for constructing large parallel processors.  BTW,
this is NOT prevented by Relativity Theory, which is valid for describing
the large scale universe.  Quantum Theory is required to describe many
physical systems that a classical theory like Relativity can not handle.
What is interesting in this thread is that Relativity predicts the 
existence of black holes, which require Quantum Theory to be modeled,
i.e. Relativity predicts its own downfall, so to speak.  Relativity is
still valid where quantum effects are ignorable.  Of course, Relativity
has its competitors, but, to my knowledge, there is no experimental
evidence to prefer them over Relativity itself.

--
  Charles Seeger            216 Larsen Hall
  Electrical Engineering    University of Florida
  seeger@iec.ufl.edu        Gainesville, FL 32611