HP Patents Nanoscale "Street Map" Technology

radsoft, pointing to this HP press release, writes: "HP says silicon electronics will reach a dead end in 2012, and wants to have a 16KB prototype of its molecular memory working by 2005." Basically, it looks like they've worked out some of the details of interfacing molecular components (still in their infancy of course, but promising) with traditional silicon.

Comments

Moore's law likely doesn't apply

[Anonymous Coward]

the article is light on details so its hard to say for certain but Moore's law applies only to devices that increase performance as their scale decreases. molecular scale devices likely won't follow this pattern since they are already at their minimum size. its a whole new ballgame and will follow entirely different rules/laws.

million geek march

[mosch]

let me know when your million geek march is, so i can arrange the million bully march to kick your whiny little ass.

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Hm...

[Wakko Warner]

So, this is a good kind of patent?

How does slashdot differentiate between good patents and evil, bad patents? Is the litmus test "Jesus Christ, I could have thought of that!"?

- A.P.

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DARPA paid for HP patent?

[byoung]

I'm really enthused to see that DARPA is funding ~half of this project, but HP gets to hold the patents. Maybe we need a million geek march on Washington to tell them that if we are paying for public (not "national security" related) research (through tax dollars), we expect to have rights to said developments.

Something ironic in there about the government funding research so that we can be forced to pay a company for it.

Re:DARPA paid for HP patent?

[mal0rd]

I disagree with your view. First of all, my understanding is that computer hardware becomes obsolete quickly, so patents don't stop the competition for long.
Second, why would HP invest ~half the money for this project if all there competitors could have the technoogy also, when they were finished with the research. The patent it their insentive.
And this brings me to my third point. I think that the government invests too little in research. This technology is a little far off, so it may not be economically feasible for a company to reasearch it alone. The government should fund more research.
If it still bothers you, think of it from HP's stockholders perspective if the government got the patent. It would be the same situation. Both organizations can't get the patent. So, the government, being the nice guy it is, decided to let HP have it.

More details here

[Thorgal]

Here's a link to an article in NYT that has more details than the press release.
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Oh no!

[Pig Hogger]

"We've received two key patents and have several more pending that we believe will eventually enable computers to be millions of times more efficient than they are today."

Oh no! This means that Windows will be millions of times more bloated!!!!

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Re:tremendous capacity beckons!

[grub]

"Why, if Moore's law applies to this new technology and they get a 64-fold increase over the following decade, they'll have built a 128KB memory by 2015!"

You have to walk before you run lad. Personally I'm excited about what may be possible.

Re:Patent or technology: which removed the obstacl

[DJerman]

Hewlett-Packard Company today announced it has been awarded a key patent that could remove a major obstacle to making molecular-scale computing a reality.

I can see RMS exploding with rage right now if he's reading this sentence. How exactly did the patent remove the obstacle?

No, it's a misprint. It removes the major obstacle to making molecular-scale computing a royalty .

Steganography Implications

[Carbonate]

If data can be stored at the molecular level then can data be hidden at the molecular level? Interesting concept. Why bother with decoding if transporting large files is as easy as sewing on a button containing a molecular sized hard drive. Customs would probably never spy it. Well maybe if they saw the IDE cable protruding from the button ;-)

Patent or technology: which removed the obstacle?

[Sowbug]

Hewlett-Packard Company today announced it has been awarded a key patent that could remove a major obstacle to making molecular-scale computing a reality.

I can see RMS exploding with rage right now if he's reading this sentence. How exactly did the patent remove the obstacle? Did they mean "...a key patent on technology that could remove..." or did they really mean what they said? If the latter, then what was the obstacle? Their competition?

Not again....

[Bowie J. Poag]

"The world's petroleum reserves will be depleated by 1980."

"The world demand for computers should be no more than 5 or 6 units."

"No one should ever need more than 640KB."

"Silicon will be a dead technology by 2012"

Umm, is it just me, or am I the only one that sees a pattern here? For christ's sake, the only thing that will probably die (and SHOULD die) are uniprocessor systems. When we get to the point where SMP is an obsolete technology, let me know. Until then, theres absolutely no need to push in a new direction when it comes to the way we fab processors..Time and time again, history has shown that the instant ANYONE whips out a hammer and chisel in this industry, and starts making a tombstone for any technology, they're views ultimately go down the tubes as alarmist and horribly myopic.

My $0.02,

Re:Not again....

[baxissimo]

Oh come now. People just remember those statements because they were horribly wrong. What about the guys who said:

"This transistor thing is going to spell the end for the vacuum tube"

"After 1970, man will not return to the moon for many decades"

"If people don't stop destroying their habitat, the dodo will most certainly become extinct"

I have no idea who said those things. But someone probably did, and they were right so no one remembers them. There are even famous examples like Gordon Moore's famous statement that seemed preposterous at the time and now is held as a universal truth.

No. I'm afraid the only pattern you are detecting is the selectivity of human memory. Some of these predictions turn out to be true, some don't. Simple as that.

Nice troll, lamer.

[nyet]

Too bad your cognitive skills are on the fritz again.

Patents make things harder for companies to ADVANCE technologically.

Fortunately, companies don't care about that. What they DO care about is making tons of money, and the patent system is VERY good about facilitating this. Espicially if it involves not having to do expensive things like research unless absolutely necessary.

Companies (especially large ones) just LOVE the patent system and the patent portfolio wars it inspires. The bigger their portfolio, the more a company supports it.. being a patent house is much more profitable than being a technology house. A room full of lawyers can create a hundred times more wealth than a room full of pesky research scientists.

Next time, if you are going to troll, try to not look like a total idiot. It will help your cause. Trust me.

Re:Nice troll, lamer.

[nyet]

Yes. The choice of words was intentionally ironic. Fortunatly, A/Cs have trouble with reading comprehension, let alone literary concepts, so it went below their radar. I am happy that you at least caught it ;)

Re:Moore's law is dead.

[timster]

Can you read his post please, dolt? His thesis is that the INCREASED competition which has BROKEN the monopolistic stranglehold has changed Moore's Law.

You mean Gattaca

[tbo]

In your first few paragraphs, you've basically described the premise of the movie Gattaca. If you haven't already seen it, rent it now--it's a beautiful film.

Now I have to ask you--just to play devil's advocate--what is so horrific about genetically "better" people being more successful (never mind how they got to be genetically better)? That's the essence of evolution, the way we came to be human. The only difference is how the genetic change is happening. If you think having some people be "better" than others is wrong, I suggest you read Kurt Vonnegut's "Harrison Bergeron". I just know I'm going to get flamed for this, with people complaining about how the "better" genes are getting allocated. Well, how do you propose to allocate them? Lottery? Government program (please no!)? Corporations (I don't have to worry about anybody on /. supporting this)?

Now that the human population is so large, and travel prevents the isolation of small groups capable of sustaining genetic drift, and social security nets prevent "unsuccessful" people from dying out or being unable to reproduce (and possibly even encourage them to reproduce), I can't see any other way for human evolution to happen.

Of course, we have to be very careful to avoid the dangers of "eugenics" and other forms of disguised racism. The best way to avoid that is to not have any sort of large, organized program. Just leave it up to parents what they want to do, and, if necessary, have the government subsidize it for poor parents.

Finally, if you still think it's wrong to be able to buy "better" genes for your children, I've got a thought experiment for you:

Suppose I happened to be born with exceptionally good genes. Excellent health, 20/10 vision, 170+ IQ, good looks, the works. Now suppose I wanted to sell my (super)-sperm. There's nothing fantastic about it--sperm banks already exist, and nobody raises much of a fuss. Now suppose I were an average joe, but had modified my germ-line cells to produce the super-sperm mentioned previously. Is it now wrong? Why? What's the difference?

Now, as for nanomachines, yes, letting governments have them would be a bad call. I think the best possible solution would be the nano-equivalent of Free Software. Eric Drexler and others have already thought of a lot of this stuff, and are working on answers to your concerns. Also, check out the transhumanist philosophy. There used to be a website at www.transhumanism.org, but it appears to be down.

You can't hide from the future--you can only prepare for it.

Re:A few questions about possible problems....

[LS]

God, what a troll! How did this get modded up to 5? God, NASA, military, cosmic rays, radiation Ok, do you REALLY understand the technology that HP is proposing? Can you tell me why the technology that NASA currently uses isn't susceptible to the same problems, and why redundancy wouldn't overcome them with the new technology? jeez These kind of posts really make me wonder... "Damn, my horse can run faster than this wheeled thingamajig! It breaks down every other day! Do they really think the cavalry will be replaced??" LS

Imminent Death of Silicon Electronics predicted

[Ungrounded Lightning]

HP says silicon electronics will reach a dead end in 2012

Hardly. Even if a feature size limit IS reached.

They only hit the wall if they stay two-dimensional. Given that the circuits are getting to near molecular thickness you have a LOT of doublings available before the chips are as thick as they are wide and high - or a closer limit (like heat dissipation) is reached.

Re:Imminent Death of Silicon Electronics predicted

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The entire history of mainstream ICs has been optical lithography on flat silicon. And that technology is going to hit a wall between one and two decades out, because atoms have finite size.

Like I said: It will hit a wall ONLY if it stays one-dimentional.

Even with optical lithography you can go multi-layer - and the industry already has. The interconnects are obvious. But vertical profiles have been built by growing epitaxial layers and doping those - sometimes repeatedly.

Still, they've generally only used this for creating "buried layers" of a single plane of components.

But why stop at one layer of components? Grow some more semiconductor, make another layer. And another, and another, and another.

Yes, yield would be a problem. (But remind me to go into the "Preposterous Scale Integration" rap some time. There is a solution. It abandons lithography for ion and electron beams and per-circuit computer feedback, but allows you to correct imperfections on-the-fly and build to ridiculously large sizes.)

Re:Imminent Death of Silicon Electronics predicted

[Tiroth]

This is true; however we certainly have yet to exploit all the possibilities when it comes to heat control. Processor voltages continue to drop. In your example a 100-layer CPU would have 1000W of disapation. However, it would also have 5 times the effective tranmissive area, so in theory we could build a heatsink that is just 5 times the size of modern CPU sinks and dissapate fully half that energy. (provided the ambient air is kept cool enough) If the voltage drops by 1/root(2) we have a feasible design.

Big-O means we'll always be limited in the 3d growth of chips, unless practical superconducting ICs come along. However, the problem is really not surface area as much as total energy output. I doubt that the average consumer wants a 1000W cpu of any kind in their box; at that disapation manufacturer's need to worry about burning down their customer's houses, to say nothing of the electrical cost. In addition, the forced-air heatsink would need 100 times more surface area or much more air; pretty prohibitive!

Within reasonable limits, we can generally get rid of heat in proportion to the linear size of the CPU, especially when you go to water (or better) cooling, increase the surface area by boring passages through the chip itself, etc. Even when the chip becomes so small that metallic sinks are ineffective at transmission we can always immerse the sinks in the cooling medium. Only then will we approach your hard surface area vs. volume limit.

Re:Imminent Death of Silicon Electronics predicted

[Animats]

The entire history of mainstream ICs has been optical lithography on flat silicon. And that technology is going to hit a wall between one and two decades out, because atoms have finite size.

It's worth thinking about the history of aircraft development. Aircraft performance showed a steady, rapid growth curve from 1900 to the late 1960s. The 1960s produced the SR-71, the 747, the C-5A, and the Concorde. And there things stopped. All those aircraft are still flying, and performance improvements since that era have been marginal.

In the 1960s, the aviation industry expected continued rapid progress. Supersonic and hypersonic transports, spaceplanes, suborbital ballistic transports, and rocket planes were expected in the near future. Super fuels with higher energy density were discussed. Giant aircraft capable of carrying many truck-sized shipping containers were proposed. Nuclear powered aircraft were in development. There was serious DoD-funded work on antigravity.

None of it worked. Aviation never moved to a new technology. Wings and petroleum-based fuels were used by the Wright Brothers, and that's what we use today.

This could be what happens to electronics. There are several known alternatives to optical lithography on silicon. But none of them are better in a business sense.

Re:Imminent Death of Silicon Electronics predicted

[Animats]

Like I said: It will hit a wall ONLY if it stays one-dimensional.

True. And you can build up multi-layer ICs. Slowly. The problem is that fab time, and cost, climbs linearly with the number of layers. So there's no real benefit to doing it other than packaging density. And, of course, there's the yield problem.

There are some semi-3D technologies. One consisted of making up a stack of dies with connections along one edge, slotted into a "backplane" wafer like a rack of boards in a card cage. The problem is that at current RAM speeds, getting rid of the heat is a bigger problem than finding physical space for the memory modules. For a while, there was enthusiasm for wafer-scale integration. Think of a whole 6" wafer of RAM as a single component. Products were demonstrated. But there was no point; traditional dicing, packaging, and assembly into memory modules turned out to be cheaper than packaging a giant IC, something that required a heavy metal frame to keep the chip rigid.

I always liked direct-writing E-beam fab technology myself. It's been tried repeatedly for about 25 years now. Works fine, writes slowly, costs more.

The problem is not that there aren't higher-density technologies than lithography on silicon. A number of approaches are known. But they're all more expensive.

There's an analogy with supersonic flight. Works fine, and inherently costs about 3x more than subsonic flight. That's enough to kill the commercial market for it.

There may be future 3D technologies, but they'll probably be fabricated by something that looks like biological growth or real nanotechnology, and can thus work on the whole volume simultaneously. That's a long way off.

Cooling the thick chips.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Another possibility is to use a more conductive semiconductor (such as carbon, i.e. diamond, if you can figure out how to dope it). Dimond is VERY thermo-conductive.

The "Preposterous Scale Integration" rap involves a 6 foot diamond cube, with power and heatsinking on two opposite faces, completely covered by the ends of two water-cooled silver buss bars. I/O on the other four faces using a forest of optic fibers, and the whole thing running red hot (diamond is very stable) in an inert atmosphere (but it's flammible!) filled glass envelope.

(The idea is to create the visual impression of a component of a golden-age SF author's idea of a computer. Like something you'd find in the Skylark of Space. B-) )

Re:A few questions about possible problems....

[cybrpnk]

Actually, I DON'T really understand the HP technology, and that's why I'm asking these questions!!! Current technology involves the inclusion of nice, standard sized "pads" or "landing zones" on a silicon chip around its perimeter where nice, standard sized preinspected wires are put in place and attached by micromanipulators. That's how a current technology silicon chip is attached to pins leading (pun) to the outside world, and it is a very well understood, deterministic, inspectible process via a microscope that has all sorts of ISO9000 and MILSPEC standards applied to assure reproducibility and quality. On a wire only a couple of atoms thick made by chemical etching, how do you assure that it doesn't have a narrow, pinched off point somewhere along it that is subject to breakage or failure? The only way to inspect someting that small is by something like an electron microscope, and blasting an atoms-thick wire with a beam of high energy electrons just to image it doesn't sound like too good of an idea.

I hope the HP technology is robust enough to overcome these challenges, and if it's not, some other technology will. I'm not defending cavalry!!! I want isolinear chips and positronic brains and all of that sci-fi tech as much as the next guy. My main point is that here's a new technology, it's a lot smaller, hooray, but now we have to rethink all of the supporting technologies around it to make sure they will work, too. That's a logical and rational step that has to be taken...and I'm confident that somebody will figure it all out.

Re:A few questions about possible problems....

[cybrpnk]

For some intro level discussion and pretty pictures of wire bonding discussed in my other reply (and flipchip technology, which is an attempt to replace wirebonding that will in itself be skipped if the HP nanotech works out OK) see here. The important thing is that there has been a whole branch of supporting technology (how do you connect these newfangled chips to pins) going for 40 years and they still have room for major improvements. Now they're jumping to a whole new interconnect technology several orders of magnitude smaller and they're gonna have the kinks worked out by 2005? Such speedy development is a bigger story than the minaturization...

A few questions about possible problems....

[cybrpnk]

HP is taking the "kill em all and let God sort em out" approach here, by using some sort of chemical etching process that makes a rat's nest of random possible connections, then figuring out which connection goes where after it's over. A couple of questions arise...Isn't there a possibility that one or a few connections just don't get made and so the circuit just won't work, even tho it's 99%+ connected? How often will something like this happen, and will it make the wafer yield too low to be feasible? How will you certify something like this for NASA and the military - they already are a little leery of things like neural nets which aren't deterministic enough to fully trust in mission critical aps. And finally, after a while don;t you get so small that cosmic rays / radiation will zap the wires? Transient resets in CPUs from cosmic rays is already a measurable phenomenon, would'nt this be worse?

Re:A few questions about possible problems....

[Lish]

Actually that's pretty much what happens in the development of neural pathways for motor control in babies. We start out with tons more neurons than we need, and the brain figures out which paths are the best and eliminates the extraneous ones. Seems to work reasonably well, but then, humans have had a lot of evolutionary time to get it right. I'll wager yields will be good enough once they get it perfected.
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Re:Vapourware or protection ?

[mikera]

Sounds like yet another example of why patents are really *bad* for innovation.

Rhetorical question: If only one company is allowed to play in a particular field just because they got a critical step patented early, then how exactly is this meant to promote a competitive free market?

How far we have come

[Bitsy Boffin]

Only a few decades ago, having that much memory would take the size of small room, and the money of a small country, in just a couple of years (2005) these guys are going to have it at molecular size (admittadly, still with the money of a small country no doubt) !

I just can't wait for usefull nanobots to become a reality.

The 16k jokes are getting on my nerves...

[Frums]

So, just so that ppl understand. The chip that is on their 128meg DIMM is actually only a 256Mbit chip, or to put it in nice terms, each chip can hold 256kbytes.

What it does is use a shitload of them.

Kingston does a better job of explaining it so I will let them.

16k molecular scale chips are a big deal.

Wow, no kidding...

[Mr_Icon]

Basically, it looks like they've worked out some of the details of interfacing molecular components with traditional silicon.

What a smashing way to turn one's boobs into a computational device.

Re:tremendous capacity beckons!

[Docrates]

Actually, by 2015 you'll have 2MB. which is not bad considering you could then have a bunch of these and actually have some usable memory at molecular speeds and power consumption, not to mention size.

That is, if they can double their memory capacity every two years, and there's no reason they can't do this, or even faster.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

If they are just connecting nano to micro...

[CyberKnet]

Is it just me, or does it seem you'd still be limited to the speed of existing micro technology?

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Re:If they are just connecting nano to micro...

[stonewolf]

I'll bet people said exactly the same thing when the first integrated circuits were put onto boards with discrete components.

This is a first step. The second step will put more functionality into the nano device. In the end you'll see a few microcircuits left for interfacing between the nanocircuits and the macro world with all the funtionality in the nanocircuits.

StoneWolf

Re:If they are just connecting nano to micro...

[gregfortune]

Probably not if it works anything like an existing system. I'd really suck if your current memory was limited by the speed of your IDE interface or even better, the speed of your floppy disk (assuming anyone still remembers what a floppy is.. )

I would assume that they could build the linking components out of molecular technology and see signifigant performance increases because the main bit pipelines would be super fast.

Greg

tremendous capacity beckons!

[tim_maroney]

HP and its partners at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), expect to be able to fabricate a 16-kilobit memory using this approach by 2005.

Two kilobytes? WOW!

Why, if Moore's law applies to this new technology and they get a 64-fold increase over the following decade, they'll have built a 128KB memory by 2015!

Move over, DRAM! Step aside, SRAM! A new memory king is coming to town!

Tim

Re:tremendous capacity beckons!

[Jim42688]

Don't forgot, most of the groundwork for building memory has already been done, so Moore's Law doesn't apply.

16 kilobits

[Big Montana]

HP says silicon electronics will reach a dead end in 2012, and wants to have a 16KB prototype of its molecular memory working by 2005."

Actually, 16 kilobits. That's some sweet power.

Fast forward, 2005. Buy one of these nano machines from Target. Buy copies of COMPUTE! NANO. Stay up till 3AM entering programs into it like this:

25,254,3,5,32,60,251,232:4A5D
...

...still searching for my Inner Adult.

Molecular-sized obstacles

[Spy Hunter]

Hewlett-Packard Company today announced it has been awarded a key patent that could remove a major obstacle to making molecular-scale computing a reality.

A patent removed an obstacle? What are they smoking? Patents create obstacles.

The technology removed the obstacle, the patent ensures that everyone must bow down to HP and pay megabucks to compete in the new "molecular memory" market, unless they work around the patent. Companies probably will waste money working out an inferior way of doing it just to aviod paying license fees. Remind me again how patents are supposed to foster innovation and benefit the economy?

Why Patents Are Necessary

[Thurn und Taxis]

Remind me again how patents are supposed to foster innovation and benefit the economy?

Sure thing. If you invented a device that cures cancer, patches the hole in the ozone layer, and cooks a juicy turkey in under 5 minutes, there's not a company in the world who would touch it if you didn't have a patent. The reason is that without a patent, the company would almost certainly *LOSE* money on the device. Getting a successful product to market requires not just the initial invention, but product development, packaging, market research, advertising, product placement, movie tie-ins, etc. Each of these things requires time, money, and people (i.e., money, money, and more money).

When company A finally releases the product, the list price is significantly higher than the manufacturing cost, because company A has to recoup the costs I just listed. However, if the technology isn't protected by a patent, then company B can come along and release an identical product for only slightly more than the manufacturing cost (since company B didn't have to do any of the ancillary work), undercutting company A and usurping all of the income for the product.

So without a patent, company A does all the work and company B gets all the profit. Clearly, company A isn't going to engage in this kind of business. However, if the invention is protected by a patent, then company B can't undercut company A's prices (or at least, company B has to pay company A for using the technology), so company A can make money by developing the technology. That's how patents foster innovation and benefit the economy.

Go Lance Armstrong!

A new twist on an old joke...

[gnovos]

"16K ought to be enough for anybody."

:)

In the future/The "lost contact" scenario x 10000:

[Nathdot]

"I have here my entire collection of MP3s on this glue-on fingernail.
Oh SHIT, I dropped it!...
Nobody move!
Everybody help me look for it!"

:)

Vapourware or protection ?

[q-soe]

Having read the article i cannot see any actual real breakthrough at this stage - what they are saying is that molecular memory may be possible - this is not a new theory.

Their 'patent' by the looks of it is being a protective measure in case someone else comes up with the idea and actually gets it to work - they estimate they will have a 16kb prototype in approx 4 years - in other words they have patented the theory that this may work but now one has actually physically made one yet - they are working on this but just in case someone else manages it HP will have the patent and thus are due a royalty on anmy product ?

Also one more comment - this is really nothing that unusual - patents like this are awarded all the time - yet this is getting some news covergae - the wording makes it sound at first glance like they have this thing working, only when you read it do you realise they dont.

Arent H P in some trouble at the moment - their profit is down and several of their divisions arent permforming and their stock price has fallen, their is talk of managment shuffles at the top. Could this be a bit of positive news to salve the market ahead of the realease of their financial data today ?