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."

Comments

Here is how it works

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Bucky

[sulli]

C60 was named buckminsterfullerene after Buckminster Fuller, the inventor of the geodesic dome among many other things.

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.

there are cubes and then there are cubes..

[TheGratefulNet]

if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010

uhm, be careful to label the right sugar cube. you don't want some hippie swallowing the whole internet now, do you?

--

such a testament to buckminster

[fringd]

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.

And the operating temperature is ?...

[gb]

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...

Re:And the operating temperature is ?...

[NanoProf]

The operating temperature of a single-electron transistor is set to a large extent by the capacitive charging of the dot where the electron resides. The first single electron transistors (SET) where fabricated with e.g. scanning electron microscope (SEM) e-beam writing technology, and the dots where consequently quite a bit larger than a single C60 molecule. A big dot has a large capacitance, therefore the charge of a single electron produces a very small voltage. Voltage, multiplied by the electron charge, yields an energy. Converting this energy to temperature, one obtains a very low temperature for an SEM-defined SET. However, the charging energy for a single electron on a buckyball is quite a bit higher. Therefore it is possible to envision devices that could operate at room temperature (e.g. the nanotube-based transistors work fine at room temperature). That said, Paul McEuen's experiment here is performed at 1.5 Kelvins (very cold) since they want to resolve very fine detail in the electron current/voltage characteristics that are associated with the vibrations of the buckyball. (I must admit- I only skimmed the article, so I might've missed something).

I'm leaving out some details here- the spacing between quantum mechanical electron energy levels is also important (it becomes bigger as the electrons become more confined in smaller devices).

Short answer- a sufficiently small single-electron device can operate at room temperature, if properly designed. The real trick (as mentioned in an earlier comment) is to integrate more than one device (say, oh a couple billion) into a useful device.

Re:Sensitivity

[torpor]

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...

Re:what would happen...

[mOdQuArK!]

I figure that we'll come up with some new "journaling" file system that never overwrites ANY old information, and basically keeps ALL versions of any given file (and maybe redundant copies to boot). Why bother erasing anything if you'll never run out of any room?

Then again, each person might end up with their own sugar cube storage & environment recording system which records their entire environment (at least audio/visual) from their own viewpoint 24/7 for their entire life. Encrypted, of course, and backed up wirelessly to a remote sugar cube, so that it won't be used against you.

(Now that I think about it, people will probably figure out ways to use up just about any form of memory that anybody can come up with...)

Sugar cube, huh?

[rjamestaylor]

(Re: sugar cube)

JW Systems Outperforms Imperial Systems in NCMag Benchmarks
PR News, Jan 12, 2011

NC Mag (NanoComputer Magazine) names JW Systems' new grain-based nanocomputer system as the winner of the latest SystemSpeed benchmark contest. JW Systems new Red-class servers outperformed its nearest cane-based competitor by more than 400%.

Imperial Systems, maker of the cubeLast year's leading cane-based system, the Cube, called the tests "unfair" and "biased". However, industry experts had expected these results since the original whitepaper by JW Systems (formerly, Johnny Walker, Inc.) that began the rush to develop the processed-grain-based technology.

Analyst Dave Wyggert explained, "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

JW Systems expects to beat earning expectations this quarter. Also, the company announced a developer's preview of its new Black class of enterprise servers on February 19, 2011. JW Systems was up 3 points in after hours trading; Imperial Systems dropped 3.765 on the sour note.

Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers