Is a technological revolution right around the corner?

Question

Someone told me that we were about to have a technological revolution. She said that this revolution was going to be due to both nanotechnology and quantum computation among other things. Is there any truth to this statement? What exactly does she mean? What will change?

Answer 1

Nano tech is on the verge of being reality, all we need to do is make microchips 1/2 the size they are now, and we know how good the Japanese are at shrinking stuff.

Also quantum computation is moving along at a pace, but I personally believe it's a little behind nano.

Answer 2

As ever, it depends entirely on how you define "right around the corner" and "revolution".

Is your time horizon 1 year, 5 years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years...? And would you accept "limited use in niche applications" instead of "revolution", esp. for quantum computing (personally I wouldn't)?

Her statement was too vague to give you a yes/no answer.

I'm a practising MSEE with 14 years in the semiconductor industry, so I have a headache with all the breathless hype from these people.

It is the nature of all promising technologies to be overhyped, especially when the people backing them have $bn-dollar grants, patents and careers riding on them.

Nanotechnology has more immediate potential.

Nanotechnology can mean several different things: nanoelectronics, nanomachines, nanofluidics, nanosensors.

As far as nanoelectronics goes, they still don't really know how to fabricate the things properly, with an acceptable yield and reliability. There's not much use having a superior device if you get 0% yield, or it fails in the field 1 year later.

Also there's the tiny issue that microdust from Carbon MicroTubes is reported to be carcinogenic, so how are you going to fabricate them without killing your workforce?

Prediction: you will not see nanoelectronics displace CMOS (in volume in real commercial processes, not press releases about lab experiments to justify their DARPA grants) until 2015 at the earliest, if not later.

As far as quantum computing goes, it has even worse problems:

- the "computer" (a few carefully-placed atoms on a substrate) is unstable and physically disintegrates within a matter of nanoseconds. => Disposable computer, or we have to constantly cool it to near absolute-zero, and even then it can disintegrate. Nobody has built more than a 7-qubit device.

- the "interface" sucks

- there is no known programming language

So as far as I'm concerned, it's still a toy. Show me what a quantum programming language looks like, then we can start believing in it.

Prediction: lotta hype this side of 2020, maybe a few niche results for esoteric applications, nothing mainstream we can use.