From Bits to Atoms

The canon of computer science rests on an unphysical assumption that software doesn't have physical units. Time, space, and energy are resources that appear only at the translation from software to hardware. Maintaining this... [ view full abstract ]

The canon of computer science rests on an unphysical assumption that software doesn't have physical units. Time, space, and energy are resources that appear only at the translation from software to hardware. Maintaining this fiction is responsible for many of the issues in scaling computing, including thread concurrency, parallel processor utilization, and interconnect bottlenecks. Rather than having multiple changes of representation of how a program appears in source code, in a circuit diagram, and in device physics, I will present prospects for a do-over to align rather than segregate these descriptions. Along with implications for what's inside a computer, this has even greater consequences for what's outside computers, by merging computation and communication with fabrication.