Computing & Computational Sciences Directorate, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Oak Ridge, TN 37830, USA.
Sensors (Basel). 2019 Sep 19;19(18):4048. doi: 10.3390/s19184048.
It is widely recognized that nanoscience and nanotechnology and their subfields, such as nanophotonics, nanoelectronics, and nanomechanics, have had a tremendous impact on recent advances in sensing, imaging, and communication, with notable developments, including novel transistors and processor architectures. For example, in addition to being supremely fast, optical and photonic components and devices are capable of operating across multiple orders of magnitude length, power, and spectral scales, encompassing the range from macroscopic device sizes and kW energies to atomic domains and single-photon energies. The extreme versatility of the associated electromagnetic phenomena and applications, both classical and quantum, are therefore highly appealing to the rapidly evolving computing and communication realms, where innovations in both hardware and software are necessary to meet the growing speed and memory requirements. Development of all-optical components, photonic chips, interconnects, and processors will bring the speed of light, photon coherence properties, field confinement and enhancement, information-carrying capacity, and the broad spectrum of light into the high-performance computing, the internet of things, and industries related to cloud, fog, and recently edge computing. Conversely, owing to their extraordinary properties, 0D, 1D, and 2D materials are being explored as a physical basis for the next generation of logic components and processors. Carbon nanotubes, for example, have been recently used to create a new processor beyond proof of principle. These developments, in conjunction with neuromorphic and quantum computing, are envisioned to maintain the growth of computing power beyond the projected plateau for silicon technology. We survey the qualitative figures of merit of technologies of current interest for the next generation computing with an emphasis on edge computing.
人们普遍认识到，纳米科学和纳米技术及其子领域，如纳米光子学、纳米电子学和纳米力学，对传感、成像和通信领域的最新进展产生了巨大影响，其中包括新型晶体管和处理器架构。例如，除了速度极快之外，光和光子组件和设备还能够在多个数量级的长度、功率和光谱范围内运行，涵盖了从宏观器件尺寸和千瓦能量到原子领域和单光子能量的范围。因此，与电磁现象和应用相关的极端多功能性，无论是经典的还是量子的，都非常吸引快速发展的计算和通信领域，在这些领域中，硬件和软件的创新都是必要的，以满足不断增长的速度和内存需求。全光组件、光子芯片、互连和处理器的发展将把光速、光子相干特性、场限制和增强、信息承载能力以及光的广谱带入高性能计算、物联网以及与云和雾相关的产业，并延伸至边缘计算。相反，由于其非凡的特性，0D、1D 和 2D 材料正被探索作为下一代逻辑组件和处理器的物理基础。例如，碳纳米管最近已被用于创建超越原理验证的新型处理器。这些发展，结合神经形态计算和量子计算，有望使计算能力的增长保持在硅技术预计的平台期之外。我们调查了下一代计算中当前感兴趣的技术的定性衡量标准，重点是边缘计算。
