World's first Water PC

June 10, 2015 at 22:54 IST | 2 Minute Read

by Amarjeet Singh Mudhar

Indian origin scientist, Manu Prakash, assistant professor of bioengineering in Stanford Unversity developed the World's first synchronous computer which can run on water droplets.

The computer is nearly a decade in the making, incubated from an idea that struck Prakash when he was a graduate student. The water based computer uses physics of moving water droplets. Prakash has expertise in manipulation of droplet fluid dynamics. He used that knowledge to perform a fundamental of all computer processors - operating clock. Prakash accomplished this Water PC project along with his graduate student assistants Jim Cybulski and Georgios Katsikis.

Prakash told, "In this work, we finally demonstrate a synchronous, universal droplet logic and control." This water PC, due to universal nature of droplets, can perform any task that moder electronic computer can, but at noticeable drop in performance rate. "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," Katsikis said. "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."

Prakash tells the purpose of this project:"We already have digital computers to process information. Our goal is not to compete with electronic computers or to operate word processors on this. 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."

Source: Stanford