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It is a fact that no one can simply keep track of today's technology development. Gordon Moore, the founder of the largest manufacturer of microprocessors - Intel, predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors on a printed circuit board until 1975 would double. He was wrong only for not anticipating that this process would not be finished.

However, the end of that is very predictable now. Computers are becoming faster and more powerful as the transistors and other parts are reduced in size- the shorter the path that electrons are transferred, the faster it works. Scientists from the American Bell laboratories have already built transistors that can carry electrons across the gap of the size of one molecule. It is clear that computer components is now difficult to downsize because soon, they would reach a size that would be measured by nanometers, and they would simply “escape” the laws of physics. This is why many experts believe that further progress of the silicon technology may be impossible.

The New Hope
Professor Kevin Homewood from the UK's University Surrey recently forced silicon to emit light by putting in it tiny traps for electrons and forced them to emit photons of light. He got a silicon LED (light emitting diodes) that works at room temperature. This discovery is very important for the computer industry (LED display) that has already been working with silicon. It is believed that the use of light is going to allow computers to manipulate with images easier than ever. Some scientists even suggest that it will be possible to make computers using optical components only, and the hard drive would be a hologram.

These supercomputers, incomparably more powerful than today’s, could fit in a tiny drop of fluid. Their chips would no longer be made of silicon but of the DNA molecules.

Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), a large molecule that looks like a ladder twisted into a spiral, preserves genetic information in all living organisms. American mathematician Leonard Edelman noticed in 1994. that the way the living world uses information form DNA is the same as the way in which information is processed by computer. Computer made from DNA has incredible benefits – Marble-sized liquid ball can contain 10 trillion molecules of DNA, and all of them simultaneously process information!

However, DNA molecules are not computers capable to solve difficult math problems. The example for this is the so-called “traveling salesman problem”, on which Eldman had tested the computational capabilities of the DNA. He gave to DNA computer the task to find the quickest route possible for traveling salesman who needs to tour certain number of geographically unrelated cities. This problem is extremely difficult for conventional computers because they must check one by one solution to get to the answer. DNA computer checks all the roads at the same time and it’s also very difficult way to solve the problem that way. But when the number of cities exceeds the certain limit, DNA computer is no longer able to solve the problem. For example, for the 200 cities the problem is so difficult that, in order to solve it, the DNA mass heavier than the Earth would be required!

Therefore it's unbelievable that the DNA, despite being an interesting solution, will ever become the main driving force of computers, but, as it is unbeatable solving certain types of tasks is, it is very likely that it will be used as a help or as a kind of parallel processor for very specific purposes, especially in medicine and transport. In 2002 the Japanese firm Olympus has announced that its scientists have made a prototype of genetic computers that can identify genetic diseases.
Bacterial Cell Computer

Dr Martin Amos from the University of Liverpool went a step further with this unbelievable technology – he began to use the whole cells to build a computer (E. coli bacteria). You can push bacterial cells to interact with the environment, and you can make a simple logic circuit, so that if the cell detects the infection, under certain conditions, it makes the appropriate antibiotic. That would certainly be a very intelligent system for producing and providing drug.

Organic Circuits
In 2001, Professor Peter Fromherz from Max Plank Biochemical Institute, managed to make the electric circuit of a piece of silicon and two nerve cells (neurons) are taken from the brain of a snail. On silicon substrates nerve cells have developed the connections that created the path for electrical signals. If one of the transistors beneath the cell changes the voltage, the electrical impulse will travel towards the other nerve cell. The other nerve cell, then stimulates it’s transistor creating a circuit. The experiment proved that it is possible to artificially make circuit which consists of electronics and organic tissue. Science discipline dealing with this kind of problems is called neuroelectronics.