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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."
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....
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-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.
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.
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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
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?
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"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.
Yah, but the FUNCTION would be the same. Store data. access times would not be a concern any more..........
Dirty Pirate Hooker
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....
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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)
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.
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
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.
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.
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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).
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. --