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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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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
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.
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.
--
lukas
Zambozay! My brain must've been eatin' a sandwich!
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 :(
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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.
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...
For that matter, with this sort of technology, using it for offline storage would be moot.
Hard drives are a hack because RAM is so expensive and difficult to maintain without loss (i.e. turn it off, away it goes). With this sort of technology, presumably we'd have a whole new realm of design to consider, such that we don't *need* offline storage (which is what hard drives used to be called) for the CPU to save to in case of power outage.
I look forward to the day when there's just memory, lots of it, it's very fast, and it doesn't require a lot of power to move parts around. *That* will be a computer worth obsessing about...
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Power savings are dubious at this point.
To get reliable operation from single
electron devices you need ambient energy
(temperature) to be low enough to not
distort signals too much. So most likely
practical devices will need liquid helium
scale temparatures. Researchers in this area
routinely envision PCs with something like
cryotech stuff only much fancier.
Supercooling will consume a lot of power.
So there may be a net gain in power consumption,
but that is not obvious right now.
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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Of course. Carbon's unique.
(Then again, so is any element, so that's somewhat redundant.)
Carbon is the only element capable of forming strong, stable, long bonds in any configuration we feel like. Not only that, since it's perfectly happy to donate an electron as well as accept one, it's perfectly happy bonding with itself.
It's not hard to figure out why certain elements are 'better' than others - carbon is simply the ideal building block, since I can build *any* structure I want out of carbon, plus maybe a few trace impurities. Now, since carbon is a light element, those bond energies are rather high, since the electrons aren't ridiculously shielded from the nucleus. So now you've got a strong, stable structure made out of one of the most common elements in existence. Oh, I definitely think carbon has a pretty bright future.
On topic for a moment, I'm greatly amused by this. Buckyballs have literally become a rather amusing joke in the scientific world, since everyone wants to use them for *something* - I've seen an article where they were using buckyballs to fight AIDS, for instance. The downside is that, unfortunately, somehow these plans never come to fruition.
So, for now, I'm skeptical. Call me back when you have more than just a transistor - say a few logic gates, and when you've got them cheaply.
Of course, that's an engineering problem.