(Newswire.net — June 10, 2015) — It is common knowledge that spilling water on a computer could completely destroy the machine. For the engineers at Stanford University however, water and computers could soon be one in the same.
According to Stanford News, Bioengineers have developed a synchronous processor based on moving water droplets instead of electrons. By manipulating physical matter rather than information, the water droplet based computer creates an entirely different class of processers.
After nearly a decade of work, Manu Prakash, an assistant professor of bioengineering at Stanford University, and his colleagues, have applied the physics of moving water droplets to the operating clock, which is a core element in computer science, since microprocessors are all about the synchronization of the operations per unit time.
The team published their results on Monday, in the most recent edition of Nature Physics.
“In this work, we finally demonstrate a synchronous, universal droplet logic and control,” Prakash said in the press release.
The water droplet based processing unit is drastically slow by today’s standard, but it never was about breaking speed records. The aim of the project is to prove that live matter could be used in developing a new breed of the computers that manipulate physical materials instead of bits of information.
“We already have digital computers to process information. Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers or to operate word processors on this,” Prakash said. “Our goal is to build a completely new class of computers that can precisely control and manipulate physical matter.”
Explaining the principles of Bio-computers, Prakash said that the team managed to not only process the information, but it manipulates matter as well.
“We have just made this possible at the mesoscale,” Prakash said, adding that the new class of processors based on a rotating magnetic field. Each rotation of the field moves droplets in a predetermined direction, and presence of droplets is defined as 1. Accordingly, the absence is marked as 0.
“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,” Georgios “Yorgos” Katsikis, who is the first author on the paper, said.
Forget expensive sterile labs, according to developers, this type of computer chip anyone can assembly easily in a garden.