A multinational team of academics revealed a new molecular device with extraordinary computational capability in a paper published in the Nature journal. The device, which is similar to the plasticity of interconnections in the human mind, could be configured for various computing activities by merely altering voltages. Additionally, much as nerve cells may retain memories, the very same device can store data for potential recovery and interpretation.
“The brain has the remarkable ability to change its wiring around by making and breaking connections between nerve cells. Achieving something comparable in a physical system has been extremely challenging. We have now created a molecular device with dramatic reconfigurability, which is achieved not by changing physical connections like in the brain, but by reprogramming its logic.” explained Dr. Stanley Williams, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University
Whenever you are attempting to learn or making a decision, the brain may literally remodel and rearrange its physical connections. In the same way, we can also intelligently program or modify our gadgets. “It was quite extraordinary; our device was doing something like what the brain does, but in a very different way,” added Dr. Sreetosh Goswami.
Regardless if it’s a simple laptop or a complex supercomputer, any type of digital technology shares a similar foe: the von Neumann bottleneck. This latency in computation is caused by contemporary computer designs, which isolate the memory that contains programs and information from the processor.
Researchers highlighted that numerous transistors might be required to conduct the very same computing operations as one of their molecular devices with its many decision models. As a result, they believe their technique will first be utilized in portable gadgets such as mobiles or sensors, as well as some other uses in which power is restricted.
