From: Jim Burnes <jim.burnes@ssds.com>
Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 02:41:50 +0800
To: Jim Choate <ravage@ssz.com>
Subject: Re: New technology around the corner [slashdot.org]
In-Reply-To: <199802181626.KAA11323@einstein.ssz.com>
Message-ID: <34EB2935.AC6847AE@ssds.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



Jim Choate wrote:
> 
> Note: Text edited for relevance.
> 
> Forwarded message:
> 
> > Subject: http:--www.slashdot.org-
> 
> >    Hitachi Makes Breakthrough Contributed by Justin
> >    [Technology] Tue Feb 17 16:40:30 1998 EST
> >    From the rapidly-advancing-society? dept.
> >    Hitachi has made a breakthrough of their own, in a different kind of
> >    storage. Hitachi announced they have found a way to reduce the number
> >    of electrons needed to store a bit of information in a DRAM chip. The
> >    128MB chips should be coming out soon, and will be perfected in the
> >    16GB (*drool*) generation of chips.

Does anyone else get the feeling that we are on the cusp of
serious exponential change in technology?   I know its been
going exponential for a while, but now I'm really starting
to feel it.  Thats major breakthroughs in two weeks:

1. 170 TB Polymer memory sandwiches (OptiCom)
2. Flat Plastic Video Screens using Light Emitting Polymers "LEPs"
(Cambridge)
3. massive DRAMS (Hitachi)

ObCrypto: Since polymer transistors seem to be necessary to implement
polymer memory, how does this effect computation speed?  The polymer
transistors must be around 30-40nm and low power.  How long until we
have Polymer PGA,PALS,CPUs?  How fast will they be?  Is it time to add
a few more bits to the public key?  Are there any cipher attacks that
would benefit from obscenely large amounts of fast memory?  Sorry if
this is a naive question to the theorists.

Jim