Conventional Computing & Transistors

 

Conventional Computing & Transistors

First lets’ talk about transistors. What are transistors actually?

A transistor is a very very small device(semiconductor) that is used to conduct and insulate electric current/voltage and controls/regulates the follow of electronic signals. Transistor was developed in 1947 by three American physicists, John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley. “Transistors are part of Integrated Circuit (IC) of every electronic device”

If you are Gen Z, you probably have seen the scraps of the room-sized computers (which had Intel III or Windows NT boarded). And I am sure people belonging to millennial would have played games such as ‘Daves’ with those the computers seen back then.

And came the era of smart phones where people hardly use computers now. Now imagine the room-sized computer which had the hardware to serve the purpose back then. What would be the size of the hardware then? And what would be the size of the hardware in the smart phones these days? This would mean that basis switching and memory units of computers or electronic devices (known as transistors) are now becoming very very small soon to match the size of an individual atoms. And thus, entering the realm of atoms opens up powerful possibilities in the shape of quantum computing, with the processors that could work millions of times faster than the ones we use today.

Now, what is conventional computing?

Think of a computer that is put on the table beside your bed. They are more or less like a basic calculator, following a set of instructions known as a program. Conventional computer does two things viz., store numbers in memory and process stored numbers with simple mathematical operations such as addition and subtraction. These two things viz., storing and processing are accomplished using switches called ‘transistors’. A transistor can either be put ‘ON’ of ‘OFF’ like we put the lights on and off in our rooms. Thus, information in the computers is stored in the form of binary numbers such as 1s and 0s. For example, a string of eight bits can store 255 different characters such as A-Z, a-z, 0-9 and most common symbols. Computers calculate using circuits called ‘logic gates’, which are made from a number of transistors connected together. In physical terms, the algorithm that performs a particular calculation takes the form of an electronic circuit made from a number of logic gates, with the output from one gate feeding in as the input to the next.

Problem with conventional computer? Conventional computer depends on conventional transistors. Imagine a transistor which as big as one of your thumbs in 1947 and now the microprocessor which contains millions (up to 30 billion) transistors on a chip of silicon.

While conventional computers were able to serve us with basis activities like sending an email, writing an office document, etc.; but with the conventional transistors, how will they be able to take care of some intractable problems such as Data Analysis (huge data collected for analysis), Supply Chain Logistics (most efficient supply routes), Drug Research and Development (invention of medicine) and Financial Services (studying market behaviors). This is where comes the need to have more binary ones and zeros (requiring more transistors); the short duration to perform the task, need of more computing power, etc. While ‘Moore’s Law’ asserts the that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit doubles about every two years. But the time will come when the most powerful computer could find difficult to solve the problem- this welcomes ‘quantum computing’.

What is quantum computing?