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IBM Demos Atomic-Scale Circuitry
Christopher Pereda sends us a LA Times story about IBM demonstrating atomic scale circuitry. Or see IBM's press release. Who needs Coppermine?
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Yeah, calling Drexler the world's foremost authority on nanotech is, in my eyes, completely accurate. Remember the ceiling fresco in The Diamond Age? With portraits of Feynman, Merkle and Drexler? As of today, those really are the big three.
Drexler's written a couple major nanotech books, Engines of Creation which is basically the what of nanotech, and the big one, Nanosystems, which is the how.
Nanosystems is a highly technical (and through no fault of its own, hard for me to understand) book, but if you'll spend a little time with it, it'll prove to be absolutely fascinating. It's somewhat expensive (around textbook prices) but certainly well worth it, especially if you have groundings in chemistry and physics. It's *the* nanotech book of today, and likely will be for quite some time to come.
-jay
There's already been articles out about smart dust doing exactly this and giving you a sensor net that self configures. The article a couple of months ago mentioned that this was feasable with micro-scale devices, stuff within today's lithographic limitations. They seemed to imply that the current state of the art in light emitting technology could be used for them to inter-communicate. And yes, with a dumptruck load dispersed in the ar, you'll get useful coverage.
What I would like to see in the meantime is chip technology moving into a three dimensional arrangement. As it stands now, most chips are basically flat. Imagine the power that could be
built into a chip that is not 1cm^2 but 1cm^3 in area! (I worry about heat dissapation though).
Hate to burst your bubble, but they already thought of it, and are using it (in limited amounts) in current processors and chips. Heat is always a problem, as well as parasitic currents causing latch-up problems. There should be examples in VLSI books. I am nowhere near any of mine right now, so I can't give an example. Anyway, making a large circuit like this would be a pain in the butt to design, as well as fabricate. I couldn't see this kind of tech going too far anywhere in the future (with current materials)
Speeding never killed anyone. Stopping did.
What I find interesting is that the it seems they are still driving to create a binary system. At least, that is what the media is protraying. Perhaps the research going on is a bit more open minded. It would seem to me that technology such as this would allow us to leap beyond the on/off limitations that we have now. There has been a few efforts to create a trinary system. I believe a research facility in Canada is working on something along those lines.
The problem with anything much more than binary is that you'd have to drastically increase the voltage to get any sort of differentiation between different voltage states, or you would have to delay the reactor to wait until the initial spike levels out, which would defeat any speed enhancement +binary would give you.
It would seem to me that these "nanotechnology" advancements would give us a much more refined control, a much more liberal control, over what is going on electrically, and allow a vast amount of <i>states</i> that the relay could be set at.
Are there any nanotech/quantum/electric buffs out there who could add a little reality insight to this theory? I do not know enough about it to really go beyond wondering.
V
I dinged my car yesterday. It has a flaw now. I dinged my toe on the coffe table two days ago. I am not flawed anymore.
You misunderstood me on this point.
Sure, you have temporary flaws from minor injuries. But no amount of healing is going to fix the flaws in the "design" of your body. Your blood vessels will never move from in front of your retina to behind, increasing your vision. Your urethra will never stop going through your prostate (yes, a collapsable tube running through an organ that has a tendency to expand). And check the Talk.Origins web site for plenty more examples of these kinds of flaws in living creatures.
Nature is not perfect. Far from it.
f you think we can do better with metal and silicon than nature has done with carbohydrates and proteins, I would be suprised.
Do nuclear weapons count? I think they're a tad more effective. And there's always the black goo/grey goo scenarios, that if they were to occur, could quite possibly destroy ALL life on (and in) the planet, rendering it completely uninhabitable.
---
"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
If you produce a self-reproducing nanomachine and release it into the wild, you loose all ability to control it (ultimately). It immediately falls under the perview of natural selection and evolution. You can put your finger in and affect little bits of if but you cannot control the thing as a whole. Even if you had strong control over the replication process, random error will work to evolve nanomachines, as a subset of the whole mass, that are no longer under your control.
There are a number of methods that can be implemented to attempt to keep this sort of thing from happening.
First of all, self-replicating nanomachines may not need to be commonplace - we may be able to get away with ONLY having assemblers doing the construction/replication, and never build this ability into anything else.
Second, we can implement various checks to help prevent it. Require a nanomachine to compare itself with x neighbors before it can duplicate itself. If it stores instructions in itself somewhere, then make it two sets stored in different locations (maybe in different ways), and if the two do not match exactly, self destruct. In any group of "wild" replicators, require a certain percentage of them to be police nanomachines, checking the others for flaws.
It's true that no method can prevent it from ever happening, but we can make it so unlikely as to rest at ease.
And we can always just create the instructions and structures in ways that any "mutation" will be much more likely to make it non-operational.
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
"The new wave is not value-added; it's garbage-subtracted" - Esther Dyson, Dec 1994
On a side note, does anyone really believe that nanotech is that amazing? Look at your cells. Nature has been there and done that, probably more efficiently than we will ever be able to do it.
Yes, nature does things quite efficiently. But not even near optimal.
The nervous system in our body uses electrical impulses to transmit the sensory data. But that's not even close to the speed at which computers transmit their data.
The bones in our body grow and are alive, so they can't possibly have the strength of the "skeletons" we use for cars and buildings.
We can already do some things better than nature ever could. Evolution isn't going to bother making something optimal if it doesn't really deliver a substantial benefit. It doesn't even guarantee there won't be any serious flaws - most living things, in fact, have these "flaws".
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"You know your god is man-made when he hates all the same people you do."
Hi, it's been a while since my 2nd year physics, but am I correct in understanding that the wave properties are a potential well (with the Cu as walls)? I'm trying to figure out how they could link any of these together. Wouldn't removing any of the Cu atoms destroy the well? Could they stack these in three dimensions, or in another vein, can the same Cobalt atom be used in different wells in different orientations? Does the effect require the surface that these atoms are deposited on, ie if you could just make a free floating ring of Cu would it exhibit the same wave properties (not that you could measure it with an STM)? I'm following for the most part, but I lost my quantum physics book in my last move and I'm looking for reference.
Thanks,
D-rock
Don't Panic...
Just imagine if your laundry could sniff itself and tell you if you could wear it one more day without your even having to get out of bed! Anyone have any other ideas?
EOF
From the article:
:)
:) I've read THAT one already. Why do you think I'm asking this question?
"Just as solid state transistors transformed earlier computers from room-sized behemoths into hand-held marvels, nanotechnology could create a super-intelligent, yet microscopic, devices, according to Eric Drexler, author of "Engines of Creation," a seminal book on nanotechnology."
Is this claim valid? I'd be interested in hearing what people consider to be *the* book of nanotech. Is there an Applied Cryptography style tome, that presumes moderate intelligence, but not much actual background? Hemos, you have an opinion here?
And don't tell me "Diamond Age".
Johnathan
I have been reading about molecular circuitry for about twenty uears now. Even Byte magazine had a good article about ten years ago describing much of the current state of the art. I now assume that we won't see real molecular circuitry until there is a need/use for grain of sand sized devices purchased by the dumptruck load.
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see. - Mark Twain
There is one estimate that the nano circuts could be running as fast as current processors are now within five years. How long will it be before they become usable? My guess is twenty years, sure I may be off its just a guess.
:)
What I would like to see in the meantime is chip technology moving into a three dimensional arrangement. As it stands now, most chips are basically flat. Imagine the power that could be built into a chip that is not 1cm^2 but 1cm^3 in area! (I worry about heat dissapation though).
This nanotech is a step in the right direction, for as far as I know circuts cannot be made any smaller than this (due to quantum uncertanty).
Now imagine the same idea as above, taking these atoms and building them on a tier-level as opposed to a plane. Imagine the power of a 1cm^3 cube built in this manner!
For a more interesting perspective on nanotechnology I reccomend: ENGINES of CREATION The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler. (I just started reading it thats why I posted this
Try to hack my 31337 firewall!
This is akin to the invention of wire, for building CPUs. They have a way to pass a signal from one place to another. Albeit, a very fast, energy efficient way.
We've seen STM pictures that show an echo of one atom, but does that mean that the STM is innacurate, and the image is being distorted by the ring of atoms? Or does it mean that the atom actually appears, at an atomic level, to be in both positions?
If it's just an artifact of the STM, then you'd need to use an STM to view this echo, and it won't be of much use. If it's actually an echo of the atom in the new position, then you should be able to detect a change in the atomic property at that location somehow. If it uses electrons as waves, focusing them, like the whisper room does sound, then surely an atom at the other focal point would be effected.
And, if this does effectively change the atomic state at a distance, in a way that can be read without an STM, then you'll only need transistors, and a way to move the atoms and you'll basically have the tools for a CPU. Perhaps, if this works, putting two source atoms in, such that both cast an echo in the same spot, could be used as a transistor, where both need to be in place, and echoing on the output, for the output to change.
But, a circuit needs to change. If you use voltage, the voltage can easily be changed. If you use the position of atoms, how do you move them?
So, you need three things, one of which they might have part of. Signal paths, gates, and changeable states.
They do have a signal path, but not over an arbitrary path, and it would be hard to extend, because you'd need two interlocking rings, one so that the echo of the first created its own echo. But, that would mess up their elipse and probably stop the echo from being created in the first place.
Any ideas on how to overcome these issues?
IANAQP (I am not a quantum physicist) but I do have a Nature online account, and I've read the actual scientific paper, so I'll take a stab at it.
This 'echo' is actually an echo of something called the Kondo effect. Basically, when you have a single magnetic molecule (like cobalt) in a non-magnetic metal (like copper) and you lower the temperature, the electrons on the surface of the copper begin to align their spins to cancel the magnetic moment of the cobalt atom. At sufficiently low temp, these shielding electrons enter a many-particle single-spin quantum state that completely masks the cobalt's magnetic moment. This is the Kondo effect. The ellipse on the Cu surface creates a number of possible waveforms (more properly, eigenstates) that can refocus this resonance to the other focus - creating another Kondo effect where there is no cobalt atom. This effect can be measured with a STM (scanning-tunneling electron microscope). IIRC, STM uses a very, very fine molecular 'tip' that is passed above the sample. As the tip moves over an atomic surface, a tunnelling current is generated that is proportional to the distance between the tip and the sample. This is commonly used to generate topographic maps of electron density around single atoms.
Theoretically, this resonance could be used to sample the orientation of a magnetic molecule at a distance. Of course, measuring this moment would disrupt it as per Heisenberg's Uncertaintly Principle, but in this experiment, they are only measuring the presence of the field, not its orientation. Since the effect disappears when the Co atom is moved off the focus of the ellipse, this could also be used sense small movements of atoms at a distance. And it could be used to link the quantum states of two molecules at a distance on a surface, effectively forming a specific quantum 'wire'. They also speculate that ellipsoids could be used to do this in a 3D solid.
Don't get too excited - the effect only happens at 4K (brrrrr) and an electron microscope is a rather impractical sensor, so don't look for it any time soon. But its still cool.
I may very well have butchered some or all of this explanation. I welcome any corrections or clarifications.
>The nervous system in our body uses electrical impulses to transmit the sensory data. But that's not even close to the speed at which computers transmit their data.
Well, yes and no. Signals going through the brain are about the same speed. From your foot to your brain, yeah there is latency. This is why reflex reactions are processed in the spinal column.
>The bones in our body grow and are alive, so they can't possibly have the strength of the "skeletons" we use for cars and buildings.
Your bones are nasty strong under compression. Your femur can hold several thousand pounds, and it actually experiences loads like this during running.
>most living things, in fact, have these "flaws".
I dinged my car yesterday. It has a flaw now. I dinged my toe on the coffe table two days ago. I am not flawed anymore. I am alive, and therefore can heal (most stuff) back to normal. Nanoprobes are nice, but they will not last forever. If damaged, will they self repair? Where will they find the metals to repair themselves with? If they cannot self repair, then the whole spying idea is moot. I will just expose myself to a magnetic pulse and short them out. (or nonleathal amount of radiation).
Here is my point. We have small "computers" already that contain a set of design and operating instructions on a small tape with error correction coding. The computer has sensors for light, temperature, touch, and various chemical detectors. It has motors for movement and operates on electricity. It is in every top secret installation in the world and is capable of killing humans. Sounds nasty? We call them germs. Heck, any protozoa will qualify. If you think we can do better with metal and silicon than nature has done with carbohydrates and proteins, I would be suprised.
Speeding never killed anyone. Stopping did.
link
it's in my head
For the benefit of those who prefer to think on a more graspable scale, IBM is exploiting an interesting property of closed ellipses. Namely, that a disturbance at once of the focii will create a miraged disturbance at the other focus. If, for example, a swimmer dives into an elliptical pool and strikes a focus, a splash will actually appear at both that focus and the one on the other side of the pool. Similarly, IBM sticks a cobalt atom at one focus of an elliptical ring of cobalt atoms. A miraged cobalt atom appears at the other focus, I'm guessing this is because atoms can be expressed as probability waves - which look a bit like the splash from a diver - and the overlap of all these waves causes an elliptical reflection. If somebody understand particle physics fairly well, I'd appreciate a clarification on that point.
Anyway, what interest me far more is how IBM plans to read the state of this "circuit" without causing a sever disruption, per the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can turn the device on or off by pushing the odd cobalt atom around, but surely attempting a read operation on the device would cause its state to alter? Does anyone have ideas as to how they would avoid this?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Funny how the researchers comments were all conservative as in "There's a long way to go" or "This is just the first step", yet reporters are already pre-ordering pin sized versions of Enciclopedia Britannica... We're on the very early stages of manipulating atoms, and I don't believe we even know if we can make a stable system, meaning, if I leave that atom there, will it stay there. As the REAL smart people said, "this is just a first step in a different direction". I believe more practical nanotec apps will come in the form of more biological solutions, since those already work in nature and we're just tweaking them, and will most likely apply to medical uses since that's where the money is (anyone with the big pockets would pay $100K+ for a shot that would cure parkinson's, but only a government would pay that kind of money for a micron sized 386DX) Sooooo, back to the DNA/RNA computers I guess.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
I disagree, if you shrink the size of the computing device,you increase the power/space ratio. We are currently struggling with processors that run with 64-128 bit datapaths. If you can fit the equivelant of 50 Athalons in the space of one, at the same speed, and parallize them then the increase is much more noticable. You have effectively gone fron a 32 bit bus to a 1600 bit bus or five 320 bit bit buses. Even if the 'processor' were taking data at 500Mhz you would be able to crunch the same amount of data in much less time. Think about a single processor that coule render one frame of video the quality of "Toy Story" or better in a second or less. The implications/applications are endless.
www.mp3.com/Undocumented
I see a lot of posts as to how lame this is.
Please excuse IBM for proving something we have all suspected for most of our geek lives. Give credit where its due.
It seems to me that at this point its all a matter of arranging these little mirage pools such that the output of two produce enough of a mirage in a third to produce an output in the third.
-^------^-
-^--------^--
-^------^-
something like that. if you can make it so that both inputs are required to produce an output, you have a logic gate. The spacing would determine whether or not it was an AND or OR gate.
NAND and NOR should be a simple matter of reversing the output's connection to the next pool(s) in line.
I really don't see this as far off in the future.
My LCARS may not be too far off after all...
Drop me a line at:
Key ID: 0x54D1D809
- Jeans that zip up for you.
I don't know about you but I definitely would never buy jeans that zipped for me. There are many dangerous implications involved. =8-oHP Labs demonstrated a molecular logic gate last July. See the article here or news coverage at ABC News.
From what I could gather, IBM added another atom into the middle of their quantum corral (published circa 1993 or so). The quantum corral is a ring of 30 or so cobalt atoms on a surface that can collectively herd electrons much like an outdoor circular swiming pool herds water. In this new development they noticed that if they add an atom a little off-center in this pool then the waves create a mirror node in the pool symmetrically with respect to the atom. Much like putting a sound post in a musical instrument or a fat guy in your pool. Now the wave patterns are influenced by the presence of the object disrupring your perfect circular corral.
Here's the big development.........
This is just like a transistor.. if you remove the atom the effect dissapears! Now all you have to do is figure out how to add and remove atoms rapidly from the corral to switch between ones and zeroes! Great, the newest smallest fastest computer on earth has just been invented.....NOT
can you say HYPE
HYPE
I actually hope I've misunderstood this because this type of media hype gives the great basic science they are doing here a bad name
Tell me it aint so
no sig.