[adastra22]

In the long run, this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bw6Zi17DBI

The story of technological progress is one of shrinking feature sizes in manufacturing. Not just semiconductors, but everything. The Industrial Revolution is really the story of higher tolerance and more reliable manufacturing pins.

You can explore the physical limits of technology by looking at what happens when we reach perfect atomic precision--every atom where we want, in any configuration permitted by physical law. Across nearly every vertical, this represents a 100x to 1000x improvement. In some cases factors of 10^8 to 10^12 over present-day capabilities.

Developing a process to build structures atom-by-atom (essentially 3D printing diamond or other gemstone materials with atomic precision) would enable skipping to these theoretical limits, with the corresponding step function increase in functionality.

It would also move our technological base off being based on rare metals and alloys, and onto an industrial economy built on carbon (diamond and graphene), and other elements commonly available in the Earth's crust and atmosphere. After 3,000 years we will finally move from the Iron Age to the Diamond Age, and with it bring an eventual end to material scarcity and the economic basis for global conflict. You'd seriously need to go back as far as the invention of agriculture or Bronze Age or early Iron Age metallurgy to find a comparably transformative technological advancement.

Within the VC-fundable horizon of the next couple years, early versions of this manufacturing tech will permit making high-value quantum devices like sensors or qubits, as these can be manufactured by introducing certain defects into a growing crystal, with atomic precision relative to other defects or surface features.

[muhdeeb]

What’s the plan for dealing with cosmic rays? I worry about when your beautiful angstrom-precision qubit networks encounter a relativistic proton or muon.

[defrost]

At near surface level ( 80m above ground in clear dry air ) 42 litres of doped Sodium Iodide scintillation crystal will experience ~ one to two thousand gamma events a second .. most of relatively low energy (and ground sourced).

The fall off from low orbit to surface is substantial in both event numbers and energy level.

The higher energy cosmic sourced events at surface level are down in the hundred or less a second (IIRC).

If there's a plan it'd likely include having 9x redundancy hardware surrounded by water deep in a former salt mine .. that'd take cosmic ray events way down and provide a (best of three) x (tell me three times) "just in case" statistical sharpening.

[adastra22]

None of that is needed. You're talking about surface events per square meter (roughly) and we're talking about a device with total dimensions smaller than a single TSMC 2nm transistor. The cross section is so small that the chance of it being hit over the lifetime of the product is ignorable. There are way bigger operational risks to worry about.

[defrost]

I provided real data about gamma events.

You're welcome.

I trust you can do the math scaling from events per 42 litre volume to the volume in question here.

The altitude and air density factor in, any LEO applications have an increased risk, etc.

> The cross section is so small that the chance of it being hit over the lifetime of the product is ignorable.

Always a possibility under consideration: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qantas_Flight_72#Potential_tri...

[adastra22]

> I provided real data about gamma events.

At an irrelevant scale. The cross sectional area of these devices will be 18 - 20 orders of magnitude smaller.

> Always a possibility under consideration...

We're talking about the cross section of a macro-scale (visible with the naked eye) chip vs. a cluster of a few dozen atoms. Certainly you can understand the difference of scale? Cosmic ray induced bit flips are extremely infrequent events at the datacenter scale.

What's the frequency at which a single, specific transistor will be struck? Not that a bit flip occurs somewhere in a large datacenter, but the chance of just a specific transistor being hit. Now reduce that 100-fold. That's the base rate we're talking about.

[adastra22]

The liklihood of a particular structure being hit is very, very small. Negligible over the operational lifetime of the device.

In the long-term vision of scaled-up nanotechnology, there will of course have to be redundancy and mechanisms for disabling, removing, and recycling (or incinerating) mechanisms destroyed by cosmic rays.

But in the near-term, it is an ignorable risk.