Comments on: This radical discovery could turn semiconductor manufacture inside out

By: Ralph Dratman

Ralph Dratman — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 18:24:47 +0000

Damon Montano, thank you for your comment on my admittedly rash enthusiasm. I am quite aware of the need for caution in jumping to conclusions about new technical achievements. Nevertheless, this particular advance strikes me as well worth a hop or two.

That is because I’ve done a great deal of thinking about the power of dense 3D circuits (literally since I was a child), about the advantages of growing complex devices instead of building them (since young adulthood), and about the brain as a gargantuan graph embedded in 3 dimensions (since stumbling into a foolish middle age).

Today, on the edge of senescence, I try out new things on my iPhone and perceive that information technology has advanced farther than I ever expected in my lifetime. Then I consider that point-like nodes connected by curve-like wires are not subject to the routing constraints of circuitry limited to two dimensions. I recall that self-assembly means you don’t have to see or touch something to put it together. I summon today’s almost-hallucinatory information technology to learn that nerve impulses in our brain travel about 3 million times slower than light.

All this suggests to me that our species will be building brain-scale, brain-speed devices much sooner than I would have expected even two or three years ago.

Doddering old dreamer that I am, such a thought still gives me a shiver.

By: Damon Montano

Damon Montano — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:42:43 +0000

….previous comment @ralph dratman

By: Damon Montano

Damon Montano — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 04:41:38 +0000

Talk about jumping to conclusions….

By: David Ish Shalom

David Ish Shalom — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 23:25:15 +0000

This article reminds me one of the almost forgoten pioneers of nanotechnology, K Eric Drexler, and his visionary book Engines Of Creation. Of course Kurzweil The Singularity… and all the notion of bottom up technology.

By: Cybernettr

Cybernettr — Sat, 01 Dec 2012 19:00:15 +0000

“He believes the technology will be ready for commercialization in two to four years. A prototype for solar cells is expected to be completed in two years. “

Usually such estimates tend to be hopelessly optimistic and I automatically tend to double or triple them mentally, but with the LOAR gaining steam, this may indeed not be as far from reality as one might think.

By: Gorden Russell

Gorden Russell — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 19:07:00 +0000

Thank you for finding this article, Amara. Self-assembly is the yellow brick road to the Sing.

By: Ralph Dratman

Ralph Dratman — Fri, 30 Nov 2012 18:54:09 +0000

This is huge. Every entity we are familiar with that has evolved on its own has done so by growing, rather than by being built one step at a time by some other intelligence. If the proposed semiconductor technology works as this article suggests, we will enter the early phases of Advanced Civilization almost immediately, quickly achieving effective immortality for our machines, if not yet for our physical bodies.

The key is three-dimensionality. We already know that our brains are three-dimensional networks with both nanometer- and micrometer-thin wiring, and that some of the connections extend over centimeters. We also know that, by comparison with today’s electronics, the brain uses very slow switching and consumes correspondingly little power. Finally, we know that our brain is made of quadrillions of components operating in parallel. If you put all these together, it is clear that nanopower 3D electronics (or possibly spintronics) can be scaled to enormous component count, with huge interconnectivity and slow switching speed, thus eluding the problem of excessive power dissipation within each small volume of circuitry.