Recent trends in information technology
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Recent Trends in Information Technology The document discusses emerging technologies that may someday replace traditional silicon-based semiconductors, including carbon nanotubes and DNA computing. Engineers have created carbon nanotube transistors that can carry 1,000 times more current than copper wires. However, challenges remain in mass producing high-quality nanotubes and integrating them into circuits at low cost. DNA computing has also shown promise, with a system that played unbeatable tic-tac-toe using DNA and enzymes as logic gates. Quantum computing uses the strange laws of quantum mechanics to potentially solve mathematical problems like encryption that are currently infeasible.
Recent trends in information technology
- 3. Progress in miniaturization and computing power in recent decades has been impressive. But there are physical limits to the ways electrons can be shunted around tiny circuits in a wafer of silicon. For this reason, researchers have been looking into alternative technologies that might someday deliver performance unthinkable with traditional semiconductors.
- 4. Some of the most interesting approaches deal with the very small—the world of molecules and the even more minuscule subatomic realm where the strange laws of quantum mechanics come into play. Molecules: Among molecules with a high profile in computer- technology research, the two most intriguing are the carbon nanotube and DNA(deoxyribonucleic acid), the basic vehicle of heredity in the biological world.
- 7. Engineers have already developed carbon nanotube transistors that can carry as much as 1,000 times the current accommodated by the copper wires used in silicon chips. Today’s computer processors, however, may have a billion transistors or more. Still to be solved are the problems of how to make similarly enormous numbers of high-quality nanotubes and how to arrange them in circuits—while keeping costs down. Nanotubes’ potential is enormous.
- 8. Their use in computer storage and memory devices raises the prospect of ultra-high capacity hard drives as well as fast random-access memory (RAM) that, unlike today’s RAM chips, would not lose its contents when the power is turned off. Such storage devices could make possible instant- booting computers, handheld computers with upwards of 10 gigabytes of memory, and MP3 players that hold exponentially more songs than today’s devices.
- 11. Meanwhile, in 2003 a pair of U.S. scientists developed the first interactive DNA computing system, an enzyme-driven device called MAYA that played unbeatable tic-tac toe. Its human opponent made moves by putting DNA into little wells making up the game board; each well contained enzymes that acted as “logic gates” controlling the device’s response to the input data.
- 13. Today’s encryption systems for protecting information transmitted via such channels as the Internet tend to rely on mathematical problems that would take an enormous — hopefully unfeasible —amount of time and effort to solve. For example, one of the most popular encryption methods, called RSA (from the initials of its inventors), depends on the fact that it is very hard to find the prime factors of a very large number—that is, the prime numbers that produce the number when multiplied by each other. This approach works for now, but what if mathematicians make a breakthrough? As it happens, one of the most celebrated unsolved problems in mathematics, the so-called Riemann hypothesis, deals with the pattern that might lurk behind the seeming randomness of prime numbers.
- 14. The keys required for encrypting and decrypting messages are represented in this instance by a pattern of particles of light, or photons, with certain characteristics. Interception by an eavesdropper will leave obvious traces, revealing that the key has been detected.