From: utzoo!decvax!cwruecmp!pearlmut Newsgroups: net.arch Title: Re: houxj.205: Re: Biochips... or bull chips? Article-I.D.: cwruecmp.440 Posted: Wed Jan 26 16:36:46 1983 Received: Sat Jan 29 08:18:19 1983 The 100 million speedup estimate for Potato Chips is based on the idea of using protiens as the individual switching elements, rather than transistor gates. A molecule can twitch very quickly, and is very small, leading to extremely high signal propogation speeds, and incredibly high densities. Consider that modern VLSI has feature sizes on the order of 1 um, about the diameter of a yeast cell. Think of the processing power in a yeast cell, and think of getting all that power in a usable form, and you see why this would be so neat. The idea is not to use entire cells as swithing elements or gates. They are much too slow, and quite unreliable. By the way, shouldn't this discussion be on net.vlsi? Barak Pearlmutter,