Computers are steadily getting faster and faster. Moreover, this speed plays a great role in what kind of computer consumers buy. At present, the clock rate of gigahertz is used to measure computers. However, the birth of the fastest logic gate in history may open the door to the beat Hertz clock rate, where 1 beat Hertz is equal to 1 million gigahertz.
Maybe you are not a computer enthusiast, these numbers may not mean anything to you. But if you have a computer running at 1 beat Hertz, it will be able to complete basically 1 trillion computing operations per second. This will make running high-intensity applications as easy as cutting butter with a laser sword.
But how did it all start? For decades, researchers have been looking for ways to create electronic products with lightning speed. In fact, one of the long-term pursuits of science is to develop electronic and information processing capabilities that can approach the fastest time scale allowed by the laws of nature.
It is this pursuit that makes researchers try to use lasers to guide the movement of electrons in matter. This concept is called light wave electronics, and it does seem to be the future of computing. By using synchronized laser pulses, researchers created the fastest logic gate ever.
What makes this discovery so important? It is understood that logic gate is the basic component for our calculation. Therefore, they control how the computer chip processes the incoming information. This means that the faster they are, the more information they can process at a time.
In essence, the working principle of logic gate is to accept two input signals and create a single output. Logic gates process information called bits, which appear in the form of 0 and 1. To create the fastest logic gate ever, researchers used two synchronized laser pulses as input signals.
Each laser is selected to emit a true charge carrier or a false charge carrier. Among them, "true" charge carriers are electrons excited by light. These carriers can maintain directional motion even after the laser pulse is turned off. On the other hand, the "false" charger carrier is set to directional motion only when the laser pulse is activated.
So researchers created the fastest logic gate ever. Moreover, it is proved for the first time that the logic gate can operate in the femtosecond time range. Of course, the researchers point out that it will take several years for this process to be used in personal computers on the market. But it is intriguing that such progress has become a possibility.