The self-assembling computer chips of the future | Karl Skjonnemand

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4.1 • 11.9K Ratings

🗓️ 27 February 2019

⏱️ 12 minutes

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Summary

The transistors that power the phone in your pocket are unimaginably small: you can fit more than 3,000 of them across the width of a human hair. But to keep up with innovations in fields like facial recognition and augmented reality, we need to pack even more computing power into our computer chips -- and we're running out of space. In this forward-thinking talk, technology developer Karl Skjonnemand introduces a radically new kind of way to create chips. "This could be the dawn of a new era of molecular manufacturing," Skjonnemand says.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This TED Talk features technology developer Carl Schahneman, recorded live at TED-at-Mirk, KGAA, Darmstadt, Germany, 2018.
0:13.0	Computers used to be as big as a room, but now they fit in your pocket on your wrist and can even be implanted inside of your body.
0:22.9	How cool is that?
0:24.7	And this has been enabled by the miniaturization of transistors,
0:29.0	which are the tiny switches in the circuits at the heart of our computers.
0:33.8	And it's been achieved through decades of development and breakthroughs in science and engineering
0:39.5	and of billions of dollars of investment.
0:42.9	But it's given us vast amounts of computing, huge amounts of memory,
0:48.0	and the digital revolution that we all experience and enjoy today.
0:53.3	But the bad news is we're about to hit a digital roadblock
0:59.0	as the rate of miniaturization of transistors is slowing down.
1:04.0	And this is happening at exactly the same time as our innovation in software
1:09.0	is continuing relentlessly with artificial intelligence and big data,
1:14.6	and our devices regularly perform facial recognition
1:18.6	or augment our reality,
1:20.6	or even drive cars down our treacherous, chaotic roads.
1:24.6	It's amazing.
1:26.6	But if we don't keep up with the appetite of our software, we could reach a
1:32.2	point in the development of our technology where the things that we could do with software
1:37.2	could in fact be limited by our hardware. And we've all experienced the frustration of an old
1:44.0	smartphone or tablet, grinding slowly to a halt over time,
1:48.7	under the ever-increasing weight of software updates and new features. And it worked just fine when we bought it not so long ago,
	...

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