Cryptography Watch

MIT Alum, Dr. K. Eric Drexler, has published Nanosystems. The book provides some details of his nanomechanical computing architecture Drexler envisioned. An entire chapter is dedicated to “Nanomechanical Computational Systems. In the book, the idea of logic rods is presented. The physical position of the rods determines a true or false state rather than an electrical signal. While no clear estimates of the capabilities of such a radically new computer architecture are made, Drexler suggests that such a system “achieve clock speeds of ~1GHz, executing instructions at ~1000 MIPS”[1]. Importantly, he also notes that signaling inside such a CPU is limited in his hypothetical design to the speed of sound in a diamond.

Perhaps, much more interesting is the energy consumption and the amount of heat which is produced due to the significant impact those two factors could have on the limitations of the number of gates which could be uncluded in a single nanomechanical CPU. Drexler says, “The power consumption for a 1GHz, CPU-scale system is estimated to be ~60nW, performing > 10^16 instructions per second per watt”[1]. That suggests a high density could be achieved.

Nanomechanical computation is an area of research which should be watched, but not too closely. It is unlikely that we will see any progress with it in the near future, say the next 25 years, due to the difficulty of precisely manipulating single atoms into complex molecular structures. Nevertheless, the extremely small scale of such systems should be kept in mind. The potential impact in the area of mass storage in regard to use in brute force attacks is very significant. Also, the possibility of creating a high density of highly specialized circuit equivalents could make defeating cryptosystems in some areas of use much easier.