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.

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?

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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.