Scientists have created an incredible computer that operates on the moving water droplets.
After nearly a decade of development, a team of Stanford University researchers have finally created a computer that combines the manipulation of fluid dynamics with and operating clock, Stanford University reported. The computer can theoretically perform the same functions as a conventional model, but at a much slower rate.
"We already have digital computers to process information. Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers or to operate word processors on this," said Manu Prakash an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford, who worked on the project with his students. "Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter. Imagine if when you run a set of computations that not only information is processed but physical matter is algorithmically manipulated as well. We have just made this possible at the mesoscale."
The ability to precisely control droplets through fluidic computation could also have a variety of applications in the fields of biology, chemistry, and even scalable digital manufacturing.
In the project's early stages, the researchers built a rotating magnetic field that could act as a clock as well as synchronize liquid droplets. This showed promise in having the ability to make sure a computer's information would be effectively synchronized.
"The reason computers work so precisely is that every operation happens synchronously; it's what made digital logic so powerful in the first place," Prakash said.
The team built arrays of small iron bars on glass slides, and laid a blank glass slide on top with a layer of oil in between. They injected individual water droplets infused with magnetic nanoparticles into the structures. Every time the magnetic field flipped, the polarity of the bars was reversed, pulling the magnetized droplets in a predetermined direction. Each field rotation acted as one clock cycle (a full rotation of the second hand), and each droplet made one full step with every turn of the clock. A camera recorded the interactions in real time, and the presence or absence of a drop represented the 1s and 0s seen in binary code.
"Following these rules, we've demonstrated that we can make all the universal logic gates used in electronics, simply by changing the layout of the bars on the chip," said graduate student, Georgios "Yorgos" Katsikis, who is the first author on the paper. "The actual design space in our platform is incredibly rich. Give us any Boolean logic circuit in the world, and we can build it with these little magnetic droplets moving around."
The chips are currently about half the size of a postage stamp, but the researchers believe they can be scaled down even further.
"We can keep making it smaller and smaller so that it can do more operations per time, so that it can work with smaller droplet sizes and do more number of operations on a chip," said graduate student and co-author Jim Cybulski. "That lends itself very well to a variety of applications."
The team believes the most immediate potential application for the computer would be in a high-throughput chemistry and biology laboratory. The new development opens up new doors for computation in the physical world. The researchers also plan to make a design tool for the droplet circuits available to the general public, allowing anybody to create a complex circuit.
"We're very interested in engaging anybody and everybody who wants to play, to enable everyone to design new circuits based on building blocks we describe in this paper or discover new blocks. Right now, anyone can put these circuits together to form a complex droplet processor with no external control - something that was a very difficult challenge previously," Prakash said. "If you look back at big advances in society, computation takes a special place. We are trying to bring the same kind of exponential scale up because of computation we saw in the digital world into the physical world."
The findings were published in a recent edition of the journal Nature Physics.
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