This is the stuff dreams are made of. Chips that run at near TeraHertz (1000 GHz) speeds would of course primarily be used in business and government applications first, datamining your personal information for the NSA or visualizing targets in an oil rich third world country for the DoD, but these chips just beg to be used for gaming.

The world’s fastest silicon-based microchip has been demonstrated by scientists in the US.

The prototype operates at speeds up to 500 gigahertz (GHz), more than 100 times faster than desktop PC chips.

To break the world record, the researchers from IBM and the Georgia Institute of Technology had to super-cool the chip with liquid helium.

The team believe the device could eventually speed up wireless networks and develop cheaper mobile phones.

“Faster and faster chips open up new applications and reduce costs for existing products,” said Professor David Ahlgren of IBM.

Exotic chips

At the moment, most microchips are made from silicon.

But in recent years, there has been a realisation that silicon cannot match other materials in terms of processing speed.

For applications that require huge amounts of calculations every second, like collision warning systems in cars and trucks, companies use exotic materials to produce the necessary power.

Materials like gallium arsenide are commonly used, but are expensive and difficult to fabricate.

However, the chip industry would like to continue to use proven silicon manufacturing technology that is reliable and cheap.

The new experiments were part of a project to explore the speed limits of devices made of silicon and germanium.

Super cooled

Germanium is already added to the silicon chips used in mobile phones to make them operate more efficiently.

Adding the element allows chips to run faster and use less power. Importantly, they can also be fabricated using existing silicon techniques.

These chips are already known to operate at faster and faster speeds as they are cooled.

To break the speed record, the researchers super-cooled an IBM prototype of a new “high frequency” device to -268.5 degrees Celsius, using liquid helium.

This temperature is just above absolute zero, the theoretical minimum temperature possible. When cooled, the chips were able to perform half a trillion calculations every second, a speed of 500 GHz.

By comparison, a powerful desktop PC is capable of about five billion calculations per second.

“A decade ago we couldn’t even envisage being able to run at these speeds,” said Professor Ahlgren.

Next generation

At room temperature the chips still managed to outperform standard silicon chips, running at about 350 billion calculations per second.

However, the researchers say they can push the chips even further.

“We observe effects in these devices at cryogenic temperatures which potentially make them faster than simple theory would suggest,” said Professor John Cressler of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The team believe it is possible to make chips run at 1,000 Ghz, or one Terahertz, at room temperature.

“Understanding the basic physics of these advanced transistors arms us with knowledge that could make the next generation of silicon-based integrated circuits even better,” said Professor Cressler.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5099584.stm

(PopSci.com) — As bizarre as it may seem, the sample jars brimming with cloudy, reddish rainwater in Godfrey Louis’s laboratory in southern India may hold, well…aliens.

In April, Louis, a solid-state physicist at Mahatma Gandhi University, published a paper in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Astrophysics and Space Science in which he hypothesizes that the samples-water taken from the mysterious blood-colored showers that fell sporadically across Louis’s home state of Kerala in the summer of 2001-contain microbes from outer space.

Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600?F. (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250?F.) So how to explain them? Louis speculates that the particles could be extraterrestrial bacteria adapted to the harsh conditions of space and that the microbes hitched a ride on a comet or meteorite that later broke apart in the upper atmosphere and mixed with rain clouds above India. If his theory proves correct, the cells would be the first confirmed evidence of alien life and, as such, could yield tantalizing new clues to the origins of life on Earth.

Last winter, Louis sent some of his samples to astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe and his colleagues at Cardiff University in Wales, who are now attempting to replicate his experiments; Wickramasinghe expects to publish his initial findings later this year.

Meanwhile, more down-to-earth theories abound. One Indian government investigation conducted in 2001 lays blame for what some have called the “blood rains” on algae. Other theories have implicated fungal spores, red dust swept up from the Arabian peninsula, even a fine mist of blood cells produced by a meteor striking a high-flying flock of bats.

Louis and his colleagues dismiss all these theories, pointing to the fact that both algae and fungus possess DNA and that blood cells have thin walls and die quickly when exposed to water and air. More important, they argue, blood cells don’t replicate. “We’ve already got some stunning pictures-transmission electron micrographs-of these cells sliced in the middle,” Wickramasinghe says. “We see them budding, with little daughter cells inside the big cells.”

Louis’s theory holds special appeal for Wickramasinghe. A quarter of a century ago, he co-authored the modern theory of panspermia, which posits that bacteria-riddled space rocks seeded life on Earth. “If it’s true that life was introduced by comets four billion years ago,” the astronomer says, “one would expect that microorganisms are still injected into our environment from time to time. This could be one of those events.”

The next significant step, explains University of Sheffield microbiologist Milton Wainwright, who is part of another British team now studying Louis’s samples, is to confirm whether the cells truly lack DNA. So far, one preliminary DNA test has come back positive.”Life as we know it must contain DNA, or it’s not life,” he says. “But even if this organism proves to be an anomaly, the absence of DNA wouldn’t necessarily mean it’s extraterrestrial.”

Louis and Wickramasinghe are planning further experiments to test the cells for specific carbon isotopes. If the results fall outside the norms for life on Earth, it would be powerful new evidence for Louis’s idea, of which even Louis himself remains skeptical. “I would be most happy to accept a simpler explanation,” he says, “but I cannot find any.”