Computronium

Overview
Computronium is the primary component of the Dominion's highly space-efficient computer systems. It is a form of programmable matter.

Origin
Various forms of computronium came about during the Pre-Dominion era. However, it was the Dominion and it's access to alchemy and untold freedom to manipulate matter at the subatomic level that would perfect these designs.

Physical Properties
Computronium consists of a dark solid, with small femto-scale cages interwoven throughout. Each cage contains a femto scale transmutation circle capable of creating an electron and a de-transmutation circle, capable of destroying said electron which is entangled to a nearby controller. Much like an early Von Neumann processing unit, an occupied cage has a value of on and an empty cage a value of off.

This design is incredibly space-efficient, allowing for each discrete unit of computation to be orders of magnitude smaller than an atom. However, it is one rather large flaw: quantum tunneling. At such small scales, it is a certainty that some of the electrons will escape their cages and corrupt the current state. This is mitigated in two ways: first, the electrons being negatively charged particles are kept as static as possible through the use of electromagnetic traps. Second, the probabilities of each cage being intruded upon by a neighbor are calculated precisely in the design of the material. This predictable and continuous corruption is then accounted for by the controllers, much akin to an advanced form of ECC memory. Whilst some computation time is lost in this process, the efficiency of femto-scale computation has still proven to be far in excess of previous designs.

In addition to the electron cages, computronium also comes with several embedded gamma-ray coprocessors. These units do not have a boolean state and instead are designed for computation via continuous principles. Containment is achieved using highly dense degenerate matter. These coprocessor units are considerably larger and fewer in number than the electron cages.

As both forms of computation are employed by the Dominion for different purposes, both units are present in standard computronium.

Usage
As you'd expect, computronium is used in computer systems. Big and small, every system in the Dominion makes use of computronium. However, most of it is found in pocket planes, the emptiness and time dilation inherent to these realms allowing for vastly more efficient computation than realspace. Planes that exist solely to exponentially expand computer systems are called "Computation Planes" and are host to the bulk of the Dominion's processing power.