Select Technologies Pvt Ltd, a Bangalore based IT firm dominates
10% of the modem market in India. Commenced in March 2000,
some of the services offered include data transmission, conductivity
of devices and access to application and information through
the Internet, personal computers and server-based environments.
The company's future plans include diversification of its
product range into Internet sharer, fax-to-e-mail products,
video conferencing products, leased line and cable modems.
"We are looking at capturing at least 25% of the modem market
by the end of 2000," the President of Select Technologies,
Byju Pillai said.
The company is also a dealer of the Ace brand of products
in India. Pillai stated that the reason for the company's
firm footing in the market in only three months of its launch
is the exclusive quality of the USPs supplied by Ace modems.
These USPs offer up-to-date technology like high-speed uninterrupted
surfing, MNP-10 error correction and Firmware customised for
India.
Quantum Computers
By Sonjoy Majumdar and B.P. Das
There has been no revolution in history like the computer
revolution. Every two years for the past half century, the
speed of computers have doubled, while the size of their components
made of silicon have reduced by half. Present day computer
circuits consist of wires and transistors that are only one
hundredth of a human hair in width.
The laws of science will just not let the size of the silicon
chip shrink below one tenth of a millionth of a metre. According
to present estimates, this limit will be reached in about
twenty years from now.
Scientists all over the world have seriously begun looking
at alternatives to the silicon chip. One of the most promising
approaches in this line of research is a computer system with
individual atoms or molecules as their basic building blocks.
Such computers are called quantum computers because
the motion of atoms are governed by the laws of a fascinating
but counter-intuitive field known as quantum mechanics.
The ordinary laws of physics which explain the motion of large
objects like bicycles and cars cannot explain the motion of
tiny atoms and molecules. There are many important differences
between a quantum and a conventional computer because the
former is based on the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics.
Information in conventional computers is stored in terms of
two states popularly known as 0 and 1 - they are also called
bits. A bit is either 0 or 1. Individual states in quantum
mechanics can be combined to yield new states. For example,
if 0 and 1 are two states of an atom, then all possible combinations
like a0 + b1, where a and b are numbers, are also legitimate
states of the atom. For a quantum mechanical system like an
atom, the states 0 and 1 are quantum bits or qubits. Information
in a quantum computer can be stored not just as qubits, but
also as combinations of them.
Trapped Ions
Schematic diagram of the recent (2000)
quantum computers, built at the
National Institute for Standard Technology, Boulder, Colorado,
U S A.
It is therefore possible to store much more information in
a quantum computer than in computers which are currently in
use. More significantly, one can manipulate that information
in many more ways using the former than the latter. It is
because of this feature that a quantum computer can factorise
any number, no matter how large it is rather quickly. This
would have a big impact on commerce, banking and espionage
as many of the secret transactions are based on the very difficult
problem of factorising a number which can have up to hundreds
of digits. It would take an ordinary computer several decades
to do this problem, but Peter Shor a scientist from
AT&T Labs in the United States demonstrated that
a quantum computer can easily solve this problem.
Following the pioneering work of Rolf Landauer and
Charles Bennett from IBM, USA,a number
of groups in the US and Europe have contributed significantly
to the research in the area of quantum computers. There are
now several models for quantum computers. However, one has
to encounter several practical difficulties in actually building
such a device. The most serious of them being interactions
from the outside world. Seth Lloyd,a leading
expert on quantum computers from MIT, USA, puts this
in the following words: "Its just hard to string a lot
of atoms together. I mean, these things are wickedly small.
They are sensitive little buggers too." Inspite of these
problems, a few groups in the US have made remarkable progress.
The most prominent being, the group at the National Institute
of Standards and Technology (NIST), Boulder, Colorado
led by David Wineland. It has very recently constructed a
four cubit computer made from berrylium single ions (atoms
that have lost a single electron). This could pave the way
for much bigger advances in future.
Scientists in Bangalore at the Indian Institute of Science
(IISc) and the Indian Institute of Astrophysics(IIA) have initiated research on quantum computers.
The model envisaged at IIA is similar to that of NIST (Boulder,
USA). However, the group at IIA has proposed either barium
or ytterbium ions rather than berrylium ions.
It certainly looks as though much of our lives, after twenty
years would be dominated by Quantum computers. It is needless
to say that the quantum (Q) dot coms would be quantitatively
and qualitatively different from the dot coms of today.
The authors are physicists at the Indian
Institute of Astrophysics (IIA), Bangalore.
Their research involves advanced applications of quantum mechanics.
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