Slashdot Mirror
Berkeley Lab Fashions First Buckyball Transistor
Atomasoft Corporation writes: "The article here says: 'The first transistors to be fashioned from a single "buckyball" -- a molecule of carbon-60 -- have been reported by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley.' It won't take so much time and we will able to buy our Nanocomputers! What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?" As interesting as the buckyball/gold combination is the machine used to make them: "The gold electrodes used in this study were fabricated on Berkeley Lab's 'Nanowriter,' an ultra-high resolution lithography machine that can generate an electron beam at energies up to 100,000 volts with a diameter of only five nanometers."
So much for IBM's little hard disk...
I wonder if they'll make and upgrade for my old USRobotics Pilot 5000 haldheld?
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
What sort of use would this technology be in implants? Something that small should have no problem operating off the level juice flowing through the nervous system. Hey....maybe you could repair nervous damage. Sheath a nerve fiber in circuitry. Hmmm....
-PARANOIA is fun. D20 is not fun. The Computer says so.
-The Computer
This could be great for storage for the average cosnumer. But we have to remember hard drives have to be built to endure wear and tear. Average harddrives will be used for years on end, something so small sounds like it could be open to a lot of environmental factors in the computer, like scratches, heat, etc. So if there's one tiny defect it could ruin (gigabytes, terabytes, whatever) a majority of the storage cube. Are we willing to risk this much to have a god-like storage system?
A bucky ball is a molecule of C60.
Basically it is 60 Carbon atoms together in a molecule that is shaped like a soccer ball
All I can say is 'cool'!
Capt. Ron
crazy dynamite monkey
The buckeyball computer works like this. The computation is carried out by shaking the ball. The result is read by opening the lid, just like a magic 8-ball.
Imagine using one of these while you're sick.
.
*ACHOO*
Just TRY and find your computer now.
Or . .
Imagine taking a project-based class in learning how to build these things (a degree in nanotechnology).
Professor: "You didn't turn in your project."
You: "Yes, I did. I put it in that microscope slide on your desk so you wouldn't lose it."
Professor: "You mean the one I'm using to examine my e-coli culture?"
'Buckyballs' are molecules of buckminsterfullerene, the third allotrope of carbon (graphite and diamond being the first two). It consists of 60 carbon atoms in a geodesic dome arrangement.
This link has an article all about the discovery and naming of buckminsterfullerene.
What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?
well that's easy, microsoft windows 2010 (released on 2011) would fill a few pounds worth of sugar...
on a more serious note, i wonder if the rate at which humanity generates information (regardless of it relevance) will grow exponantially at the same rate as the media we use to hold it. so far it seems they've been pretty much the same for a while, i've always felt the same way about a HD, it seems huge when you buy it, but you always fill it out...
i guess eventually storage media's capacity will grow that much faster, when will that be? opinions?
There are two kinds of people in the world: Those with good memory.
Although buckyball transistors would indeed be useful for storage it wouldn't be in the form of a harddrive like we know them. Hard drivers are mechanical things that store stuff magenetically. these would work alot like RAM.
A rabbit in the hand is worth 4 in the cage
Q: What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?
A: You would have to get a second cube to install Windows 2010.
134340: I am not a number. I am a free planet!
dude, if you would have actually read the article you would have noticed the link to this article in the NYTimes which gives a brief history of buckyballs.
--
lukas
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
It seems like everything that has incredible implications in the world of technology is fashioned from carbon. Lightweight Carbon composite fabrics for use in a solar sail, Carbon nano-tubules for strands of semi-conducting material, etc. Is Carbon going to be the nano-medium of the nanoscopic age?
Pax Digitalia
I remember an old movie in which the good guys break an abacus on the floor to make the bad guys slip and fall. Now in the remake, the good guys will break a pentium IVII chip on the floor and let the little buckyballs do the job.
Of course by then whatever desk space you save with a tiny computer will be taken up by your 80 inch monitor. And you can perish the thought of sitting your monitor on top of one of those :)
That also raises another issue, I find it hard not to lose things like pens and cds off of my desk, when my pc is the size of a eunuchs prick i'll certainly waste a lot of money having to replace em :(
Slashdot: Proof that a million monkeys at a million typewriters can create a masterpiece
Fans of Bucky who happen to be in the SF Bay Area should check out R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (And Mystery) of the Universe, a one-man play about his life, based on his writings, designs, and photos. It's fascinating. Info is at Foghouse, the theater company that's producing the show.
sulli
RTFJ.
uhm, be careful to label the right sugar cube. you don't want some hippie swallowing the whole internet now, do you?
--
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
Didn't I read somewhere that buckyballs, being almost perfectly round, would make a perfect molecular lubricant? Imagine micro motors that could run infinitely fast without burning out.
Dirty Pirate Hooker
buckminster fuller is a real world mad scientist. everybody thought he was off his rocker. he cast away the entire euclidian gemoetry in favor of a triangle based way of thinking. he built a car with three weels, circular air-deliverable houses. and fasioned the geodesic dome. after he died, it was discovered C60 naturally occurs in the shape of a geodesic dome. it just shows how damn cool he is. read more about this legend.
Just curious, but what the hell kinda number is IVII? hmmmm.... On second thought, knowing intel's past with their buggy fpu's, it is guite possible they'd release a chip with this Roman numeral.
Think about it - a network of Buckyball Transitor based Plastic computers that you could wear as a patterned jacket in a beowulf cluster!
Man, all you'd have to do to increase your computational resources would be to hang your jacket up in the closet!
--- Will in Seattle - What are you doing to fight the War?
This is a great news and all, but it'll be a LONG time before anything is produced commerically from it. It would take considerable engineering efforts to implement a new process in manufacturing of any type of IC. Just look how slow copper is making the progression. Only bleeding edge technologies can benefit from it because the process of building an IC from copper is entirely different from alumnimun. Now, in that example just the materials are different... imagine if the entire method to produce transistors is different....
---
Hmm, let's see now:
Now we have the nano-sized transitor (MOS-FET, actually), the carbon nano-tubes (which have a variety of uses, from springs to struts, etc...) and the carbon nano-bucky ball. We have tiny electrostatic motors, tiny gears, and many other things that are shrinking in size.
Is there any group hell-bent on putting all of this nano-stuff together and making something?
I just get the sensation that we are approaching the point where we should have enough misc. nano-sized parts to actually make something VERY cool... mechanical style.
Ok, I'm really sick of typing 'nano' now. =)
Without having read the original nature paper (being at home and not in the lab) - I wonder what the operating temperature of this transistor is ? It sounds remarkably like a single electron type device, and generally they have to be operated at a few mK (like -273.14 Centigrade), so you get a very, very small computer with several hundred kg of fridge attached...
Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Buckyball.
Caution: Happy Buckyball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
Happy Buckyball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
Do not use Happy Buckyball on concrete.
Geoff (credit to Saturday Night Live for Happy Fun Ball)
I can't wait to watch the upcoming Nanocup through an electron telescope.
Mind expanding chemicals, Mind expanding os, Mind expanding astrophysics and now: Mind expanind electronics. Does that make it: Bezerkly: Who needs .tar to expand the universe?
while all of this speculation about storage in sugar is nice it has very little to do with the atricle in question. The atricle is about TRANSISTORS, which are effectively switches in a micro-processor..
the huge advantage that this discovery will bring is devices that because they operate using the the state of a single atom are soo small, and draw sooo little power that will wil be able to surpass everything currently being deigned by intel and amd
Icars
I'm going to avoid pointing out the obvious. The cube would be packaged in such as way that you could not loose it. You need interface anways, you can't just will the information from the cube.
C60 means 60 atoms of carbon twelve covalently bonded. This means that the atoms share electrons with their neighbors as opposed to passing electrons around. Covelant bonds are an extremely stable type of chemical bond.
I found this article to be somewhat dissapointing. I was hoping that the researchers had come up with a way to concretely take an atom and use it as a logic gate. Instead, they 'used a solution' of atoms in-between electrodes and noticed that the solution had the properties of a transistor. Then they got 'excellent' correllation that there were in fact buckyballs in there.
Hopefully the day is not long off where one can take indidual molecules and string them together to perform complex boolean operations at the molecular level. When that happens, molecular computing will be a reality. But it ain't there yet. . . .
-s
- - - - - - - -
Don't worry, being eaten by a crocodile is just like going to sleep in a giant blender.
Wasn't the fist Happy Fun Ball pioneered at Berkeley as well?
One of the many things I hate. thingsihate.org
With sizes that small, you would be able to build mayn many RAID equivelance systems for your data, in fact redundancy would become an integral part of the system.
Hey baby, guess how many gigs are in my pants.
or
I got the entire libary of congress in my jean pocket, want to see?
I think the ONLY REAL use of cool techonlgy is to be used to come up with better pick up lines.
"`Ford, you're turning into a penguin. Stop it.'" -THHGTTG
Hi there,
If this beast "the Nanowriter" pumps out electron beams of only a 5 nanometre diameter, now we can get a truly infinite resolution monitor!
It could happen.
arnald
*Me walks over to coffee, puts in surgar and looks at the email screen's error message*
"Error, Internet is being digested"
*Me looks at coffee*
"Ah, Crap!"
Between this and plastic electronics I can finally have my PC installed in my body. Install locating chips in my fingertips and I can control/type. Heads-up style monitoring through contact lenses would be cool. If my body cannot generate enough power I could replace a nad with an inertial generator ("but, honey, I need recharging.") This could lead to odd behavior in public. ("Is he dancing?" "No, it's a DoS attack.")
"..don't you eat that yellow snow."
I have to say, what is described in the article is a far cry from a transistor. All they have done to this point is fill disconnected gold contacts with conductive Carbon-60.
From the article:
"the authors stated in their Nature paper. "The transport measurements demonstrate that single-electron tunneling events can be used both to excite and probe the motion of a molecule.""
Have these guys ever heard of a tunneling electron microscope? Have they not seen the "IBM" written using individual atoms? This doesn't sound too new to me yet. It is possible I am missing something since the article doesn't seem to be written for engineers. Of course, once I got to this part:
"McEuen says this quantized nano-mechanical movement of the carbon-60 might serve as a logic gate, a means of storing information in the position of the molecule that would be more stable and much faster than the current technology."
I realized they hadn't made a transistor yet. All they have done is connected two electrodes with carbon-60, and since they might be able to isolate carbon-60 between two electrodes, they might be able to make something useful with it. Heck, they only have two electrodes right now, and last I check, transistors were at least 3 terminal devices. I don't mean to belittle their work, it is definitely a good road to follow, but it is also definitely a long road still. Let's not all get too excited too early.
...What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube...
Dude 1 Have you seen a sugar cube around here?
Dude 2 Yeah, on that plate. I put it in my coffee.
Dude 1 Dude! That was the whole internet. It was our only copy!
Dude 2 Oh well, S*&^ happens.
Dude 1 What's it taste like?
Dude 2 (sip...) sort of raunchy.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, but if life gives you nanometer sized fissures and buckeyballs, make transistors.
The best way to accelerate a windows box is at 9.8 meters per second square.
-------
CAIMLAS
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
They've used buckyballs to bridge a gap, allowing conduction. They've used electric fields to bounce the buckyballs up and down, switching the conduction.
That sounds to me like a nanometer-scale relay - or getting very close to one.
Relays are amplifying switches. You can make computers out of them, just as you can make computers out of transistors or tubes. In fact, that's EXACTLY what was used in tabulators for decades, before (and even while) tubes moved in to do the faster stuff, creating the "elecTRONic computer".
Cray was still using relays to decode the panel display and as an IPL ROM in the Control Data 1604 in the 1960s. Most of the switches in the 1604 were germanium transistors - upgraded to silicon transistors later in its life cycle.
Indeed, transistors in modern CMOS circuitry are just serving as an approximation of relays. A CMOS logic gate's schematic looks much like the "ladder diagrams" used to this day to design relay-based logic circuits.
While moving small molecules is slower than moving electrons, it's comparable in speed to moving holes. So at nanometer scales an electromechanical relay, with a bucky ball or a molecular side-chain for the armature, can be an adequately (blazingly!) fast switching element.
Electrons are light and thus spread out. So they are very sensitive to temperature and have a long cross-talk range. Molecules are more compact and tend to focus electrons as well. So circuitry that uses a molecule, rather than a cloud of electrons, as the moving part in a switch might lead to higher component densities and a broader environmental operating range.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Want the full skinny on C60? Just read:
The Most Beautiful Molecule
The Discovery of the Buckball
ISBN 0-471-10938-x
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
I think it's every good geek's duty to have read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. ISBN 0-553-57331-4 on my copy. Also, check out all of his other books so far, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. They're pretty nice too.
-Forager
student of animation and the fine arts
Despite a dozen years of nifty discoveries and Nobel prizes, there hasn't been significant commercial profit from these discoveries (same as UNIX/Linux! and high temp superconductors).
They've used buckyballs to bridge a gap, allowing conduction. They've used electric fields to bounce the buckyballs up and down, switching the conduction.
Perhaps I misread their paper, but it sounded to me like they hadn't moved the balls with a third terminal, but merely moved it with electrons from the existing gold electrode, causing an oscillation as it bounced from the ball to the electrodes. Do you know if they have actually controlled the switching and I misread, or have they merely observed the bounce from the two electrodes?
I have a few of those in my attic too.
...
I also have a Handspring Visor[Palm], which will evolve into a much more powerful computer, I'm sure of it, and it follows the same policy of using a permanent resident store for all data and applications...
Actually, I believe this is one of the reasons it's such a successful platform - the assumption that all data is always available, and there is no secondary 'commit' stage to offline storage means that the OS can be used a lot more efficiently by the end user
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
FETs and their relatives MOSFETs use this type of behaviour. Physically the canisters have three (or more) connectors, but electrically only two are in the conductive path - the third provides an electric charge, a field which controls the conduction. Hence, "Field Effect Transistor".
:-)
Something like this:
~~~I
---O---
(badly drawn, I know
The charge provided by the I lead affects the field through the "ball", which in a FET is a layered piece of silicon (MOSFET is different, "Metal Oxide Semiconductor"), the width of the layer is effectively controlled by the field, sort of like a water pipe with a magnetically controlled valve: The valve doesn't have to be manually connected, you could just wave a magnet around.
Hope I'm making sense...
/prak
--
We may be human, but we're still animals.
I understand very well how MOSFETs, JFETs, etc. work, but in the article, it sounded to me like the oscilation in conduction was not being induced by a third terminal, but instead by electrons hopping from the two electrodes. Did they actually have a third terminal to control the conduction and induce the oscillation? I do not think so, but I may be wrong.
That's my dream too. It simplifies the architecture vastly; and it allows arbitrary data structures to be used, instead of having to shoehorn everything into tables or hierarchical sets of files. "indexing" and "querying" can be as fast and as optimal for the application as you need them to be... because you have to write your own. :-) (or use some reusable library)