Post CMOS Computing Beyond Si: DNA Computer as Future Alternative

Computers have become an inherent part in everyday life due to its power of automated and fast computing. With the discovery of transistors in 1947 at Bell Labs, era of electronic computing started, that took a new shape with Moore's law in 1965. Even with its wide applicability, this electronic computing has a disadvantage of executing all instructions sequentially. Hence for problems requiring exhaustive brute-force search, with sufficiently large search-space, conventional computer may take even years to solve. Also, due to several other factors, such as power requirement, size of transistors on the Integrated Circuits etc:, the conventional computing is approaching a barrier, thus giving rise to several non-conventional computing techniques, such as Quantum Computing, DNA Computing, Membrane Computing etc. Among these different nonconventional computing techniques, DNA Computing proves to be a better alternative for solving the problems requiring exhaustive brute-force search, due to its inherent parallelism and massive storage capacity. In this article, with an introduction to DNA computing and its models, its strength has been discussed. Then several areas in which DNA computer can be applied successfully has been discussed.