慶應義塾大学
2007年度春学期

ムーアの法則後のコンピューター技術
Post-Moore's Law Computing Technologies

2007年度春学期　火曜日2時限
担当: Rodney Van Meter
E-mail: rdv@wide.ad.jp

プロジェクト(計画）のアイデア
Ideas for Projects

There are several basic types of projects you can perform this semester.

Design and build something physical!
- mechanical reversible adder
- small water circuit
- wireless ping-pong ball network
- mechanical cellular automata, e.g., Game of Life
- real, mechanical Turing machine
- machine that sorts balls by weight or color
Design and build something virtual
- Voicenet: using speech synthesis and speech recognition as a low-bandwidth network
- build some part of a CPU datapath in the Game of Life or some other cellular automata
- simulate a Turing machine
- adapt a circuit simulator or design tool for reversible (conservative) logic (Magic, XTW/XEQ, etc.)
Find a physical process and describe the computation it performs
- a sundial
- an oscillator circuit
- an interferometer
- an optical slit Fourier transform
Analyze an existing computer system
- How many transistors are there on the Internet? Graph versus year. Compare to the number of synapses in the human brain, and tell me why you do or do not believe that is a useful comparison.
Design something new (theoretical studies)
- a reversible ternary (trit) adder
  possibly a paper for IEEE Transactions on Computers special issue on arithmetic (due July 22)

For your project, you must be able to answer the following questions:

Additional questions you should consider:

How can it be programmed, or incorporated into a larger system that can be programmed?
Is your logic synchronous or asynchronous?
What is the energy consumption?
What are the failure modes? Is it fault tolerant?

There are many resources on the web and in the library on many forms of unconventional computing. Here are a few: