Slashdot Mirror
IBM Creates 1st Single Molecule Computer Circuit
Llowfyr writes "Yahoo has reports that IBM researchers have created the first ever single molecule computer circuits which may someday lead to a new class of smaller and faster computers that consume less power than today's machines. The IBM team made a `` voltage inverter '' -- one of the three fundamental logic circuits that are the basis for all of today's computers -- from a carbon nanotube, a tube-shaped molecule of carbon atoms that is 100,000 times thinner than a human hair. IBM scientists will present the achievement today at the 222nd National Meeting of the American Chemical Society being held in Chicago and it appears in the web edition of the ACS' journal Nano Letters."
Geez. Didn't you guys learn anything in chemistry?
A crystal is a single molecule. A transistor is a single molecular structure. It won't work any other way.
--Blair
but when can I actually buy a computer with this technology? 10 years from now?
I like to see research of this type, but there needs to be more research with short-term effect.
Ask Slashdot: IBM Creates 1st Single Molecule Computer Circuit
Erm, what was the question again?
Well... this surely looks like another great step towards high performance computing!
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
Of course, there are many other intriguing fields of research that this opens up, such as the problem of making a processor that consists of only 1 nanotube and creating some kind of networking interface that would allow individual nanotubes to communicate.
So please, before you go off blindly moderating posts such as these, please think of the questions that they are really asking, rather than your ingrained Slashdot instincts.
Is your company running tools written by ma
...to even see a beowulf cluster of these ;)
Whatever happened to the ones that just shut up?
Ok, lots of smart people on /. someone explain this please. Because the article sure doesn't!
What, me worry?
Huh? I don't get it.
Dammit. Back in my day, we had real transistors, and silicon. We made chips out of SAND, dammit! None of this molecule pish posh. I ain't never gonna use some computer made from plants. You new-age scientists sure are ungrateful...
The next comment I write will be ready soon, but subscribers can beat the rush and see it early!
Why is this exactly under "ask slashdot?"
...but does it run Linux?
fear my zig!
(In case you may want to check)
Since IBM has successfully made a NOT gate out of a single molecule, they have made about 1/3 progress towards realizing a complete computer system made out of molecules. In fact, if they could make NAND gates out of these nanotubes, then they have everything they need to build a computing system since a NAND gate is functionally complete. Question is, does this mean that in the near future, the government will be able to implant invisible microchips in people for identification and tracking purposes, and what does this mean? Is this a bad thing looming in the future?
Am I a hipster-doofus?
Crystals arent molecules at all. Crystals are crystal lattices, which are all ionic compounds. molecules are covalent. Which one of you was it that didnt learn anything in chemistry again?
I am !amused.
100,000 times thinner than a human hair
There is hope for us blonds yet.
What IBM need to do now is make an AND gate. The output of an AND gate, fed into a NOT gate (NAND), can form the building block of any digital logic element you care to name (gates, registers, etc.) Then they need to figure out how to join them together, and get signals in and out. Then figure out if a nanotube processor would actually be useful! :> Anyone know the theoretical switching time of these type of devices?
I love to see the advancement of human knowledge, especially when it bodes well for making faster and smaller computers. It will probably be ten years before we see direct consumer benefit, but, hey, this research all has to be done sooner or later.
Just tell me big the damn thing is in regular units: meters, angstroms, astronomical units, whatever.
...which may someday lead to a new class of smaller and faster computers that consume less power than today's machines.
Jeez.. I hope whoever to persue this "smaller, faster, more efficient" idea a raise.. What a novel idea...
Click here to read too much about my personal life
I found the full paper here (that's http://pubs.acs.org/hotartcl/nalefd/nl015606f_rev. html for you paranoid types).
I was just thinking - they say their NOR gate is the size of approx. 1/100,000th the width of a human hair. Well, today's 1.4 GHz chips contain ~22 million transistors. That would make it 220 human hairs wide. That's a lot of power in a small space. I can't wait till the day I can crack RC5 on my cell phone.
--
#nohup cat
Your education is shallow and misled.
Diamond is not an ionic compound. It is composed of carbon atoms in the optimal arrangement to form covalent bonds. Tell me diamond isn't a crystal.
Bonds are rarely 100% covalent or 100% ionic. A crystal is a single molecule (but not all single molecules are crystals). These facts are old. Very old. Older than your textbooks. Shame on your school.
I won't get into the semantic argument about solids, liquids, gases, and how any of them can be said to form or be formed by crystals, because that would only confuse you (and because in the more intricate cases I'm bound to forget the details and my book is in another state). Just trust that the definition of "crystal" that you are using here is very inadequate.
Go search on a few things:
Ionic Bond
Covalent Bond
Ionic Character
_General Chemistry_, by Linus Pauling*
--Blair
"We teach chemistry like it's either a foreign language about a dead religion or a way to make the neighborhood kids think we're cool."
P.S. I'd like to thank the Academy for down-modding my original post. It's always nice to see that the forces of intolerant ignorance continue to crawl the planet. It keeps an exterminator of such things in poker money.
* - the Dover 1989 reprint of the 1954 edition only costs like $14. How much did you pay for a semester of your college's misapprehensions?
I would want to buy one of the first nano-computers as well but I think we both would be dissapointed initially. The problem is today's machines are already over powered for what most I would be more interested in something that takes advantage of the smallness and lots of extra CPU power. As it is today's desktops are way overpowered for most applications. MY computer compiles all my code in a blink of an eye and if you lowered the CPU speed by a few hundred megahertz, I would probably not even know the difference. What I am waiting for are nano-computers integrated in nail polish, wall paper, and clothes with verbal interfaces like Star Trek TNG. Would it be sweet to have you clothes download the next style automatically instead of buying new clothes or wouldn't it be cool to say "computer, play cnn news", and your whole wallpaper turns into a television screen playing the news.
With embedded nano-based technology this will be a reality. I have serve ADHD and if I can have a computer do real research with a verbal interface and advanced AI to interpret what I ask, and retrieve the data, I could write a research paper in a third of the time. No more library visits! It's all retrieved for me. I love LCARS on star trek's enterprise D where you can receive and information you wanted just by asking.
My guess is the first generation of nano-desktops will be mediocre because they will run the same software as today, or Microsoft will take years to write a version of windows for it so it stays locked up in R&D labs for years. Kind of like IA-64 syndrome. It already runs Linux but Intel wont release it because Microsoft is not done writing windows for it. I guess the business world does not see reality existing outside of windows. Sigh.
Anyway the extra apps like IA, verbal speech recognition, advanced clustering, pixel generation, and advanced networking would come years after the technology is out. Perhaps the Gnu community can address these needs as corporations will try to propritize the market and exploit it for high prices.
http://saveie6.com/
I was cuting and pasting two paragraphs and I scrwed up.
I meant to say " The problem is, today's machines are already over powered for what most people actually use them for. I would be more interested in something that takes advantage of the smallness and lots of extra CPU power."
Boy do I feel like an idiot.
http://saveie6.com/
They don't know what they mean.
A transistor either switches a current path off (output_on = power_on AND NOT control_on) or it switches it on (output_on = power_on AND control_on).
Those are the real building blocks. Larger structures like gates and flip-flops are combinations of those two facts.
Some circuits use multi-leveled logic, but those have to be converted to boolean logic* before they can get anywhere near your computer.
--Blair
* - or whatever passes for it at the NY Times...
...which may someday lead to a new class of smaller and faster computers that consume less power than today's machines.
The problem is that with all this power, we still have lazy programmers that aren't writing cleaner, more efficient code, basically negating all the advances that have been made in processing technology. I mean, computers today are a million times faster than they were years ago, but do we see any major increase in speed?
_______________________________
"I'm not Conceited...I'm just a realist..."
Wow, Reggie White reads Slashdot!
...wearing a skin-tight topless leather jumpsuit, with cutaway buttocks and transparent crotch panel.
I'm made out of molecules too...my mom was even further ahead of the times than Apple.
My cat's breath smells like cat food.--R. Wiggums
Just wait till we have add-ons that are 1/100,000 the width of a human hair!
Now where did I put those molecular-tweezers???
Check out the pictures and graphics that IBM has made available.
And let us not dwell on the fact that I submitted a better version of this article early in the morning with more links than the one they decided to go with(sulking ends now).
I'm a writer, a poet, a genius, I know it. I don't buy software, I grow it.
and just what colour IS the sky on your planet?
Someone pointed out that IBM just needs to create a similar AND gate, as anything can be made out of AND gates and Inverters. However, no one has mentioned that the same thing can be done with OR gates, as the NOR gate is a universal gate as well. In my opinion, its more of a pain to work with, but hey, whatever works for IBM is fine with me.
"Who is more foolish? The fool, or the fool that follows him?"
Obi-Wan Kenobi
The government, changing every 4 years, doesn't care about you. But some private corporations and peuso-organizations (RIAA, MPAAA, BSA, etc) would be very interested in tracking people the worst way possible. You should worry about these, not about a useless "government" thingy.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
... And guess what will people ask in the first place ?
To install Windoze 2020 service pack 13 on a
molecular computer...
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
As classically understood, molecules are fundamental chemical units composed of atoms in precise amounts, types and arrangements. Molecules can't be subdivided without changing their chemical properties.
Crystals are not molecules because their constituents need not appear in precise proportions (a water molecule on the other hand is ALWAYS 2 hydrogen and one water), and because you can break them into chuncks that have identical intensive chemical properties. Crystals have basic units which are molecules or single atoms and combine to form the crystal lattice (often with trace impurties which are important). Crystals are chemcially bonded together, as are many things, but this does not make them molecules (according to the classical definition).
Things like diamond, polymers, DNA, and nanotubes have come to challenge the bounds of what people label as molecules. Many people, news media, and some scientists have come to accept a broader conception of molecules as being any stable, complete (as in not attached to something), and strongly bonded (doesn't usually spontaneously disassociate) compound. Myself and others I know tend to consider this looser definition to be a foolish disregard for the important aspects of the previous definition.
Knowing that what you are studying is the smallest unit with the properties you are interested in is a powerful piece of information. Similarly knowing that this basic unit requires a particular arrangement of certain atomic types grants you the keys to understanding it.
As far as I'm concerned crystals are chemical compounds or chemical aggregates but not molecules. Same for polymers (unless the context makes it important to distinguish 40-unit from 41-unit and every other length of polymer, etc.). DNA is a molecule because every single arrangement is important to how it functions and no piece has the full chemical functionality of the whole. Nanotubes, on the face of it, seem to be polymers and thus not molecules (though I don't have enough depth in the matter to say for sure.)
So we have the first logic process made out of a polymer, but it's not a specific molecule that does the job. I'm glad chemical bonds hold their tubes together and I'm glad they make our standard transistors possible, but chemical bonding != molecule.
What they have invented was a single molecule inverter, not a nor gate. a inverter or NOT gate if you want a different name, inverts the 1 to a 0 on the other side (from 5 v to 0 v in TTL). A NOR gate is a OR gate with an inverter on the output of the OR gate.
Gorkman
220 hairs wide - if you lay the gates side by side. I don't know how much space they do need between gates, but the width of a chip is going to more like 1/100000 * number of gate widths needed for layout * sqrt (22,000,000). So assuming they need 1 gates width on either side of each gate (for a total gap of 2 gates width between gates), the core of chip would be ~0.14 human hairs wide.
Sure, if they lined them all up side-by-side in a straight line. Think more like a square 220^(1/2) = 14 human hairs to a side.
Actually, it is perfectly possible to make really fast applications using Java (I do)... You just have not be a dumb programmer.
-- javaDragon is an instance of JavaDragon.
I think the great achievement is represented by the _potential_ that carbon nanotubes have in miniaturisation. For the moment the lenght of the
transistor's chanel is 250nm which is in range of today's technology - 180-130 nm.
What have you leaned today? Well I leaned on a car and I also leanded on a counter. Some things that I have LEARNED is that teachers are really great people
Three fourths of NASDAQ listed corporations announced single molecule revenues for the third quarter. Analysts insist that such predictions are hardly in good faith, and that the majority will be lucky to turn revenues amounting even to a single quark. Wall Street bravely marches on, into this blossoming nano-economy.
Plus, the transistors are stacked in many layers. Minus, you need a lot of space for layout and connectors, and probably some for heat dissipation.
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I doubt that in the extreme. 40 atoms I might believe - perhaps some journalist made a typo / miscaluation / misquote and added an extra zero to 10,000.
As the saying goes, "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you read."
There's no reason for a sig here.
Well, you're traveling along your path without "jumping" blablabla,
so you have P(t) your position on the path at time t, so that P(0)=A and P(T)=B (it took T hours, (T>1 because (B-A)>v miles) to get from A to B)
So let's call F(t) the function that gives you at any time (in hours) the distance you are going to travel the next hour according to the trajectory P.
Clearly, F is continuous on [0, T-1] because P is continous on [0,T] and F(t) is P(t+1)-P(t)
F could be always equal to v (v=(B-A)/T).
It would mean your speed is constant during the travel and is v, so that at any time, you are going to travel v miles the next hour.
Clearly, F can't be always less than v, because then your average speed would obviously be less than v.
Also, F can't be always greater than v, because then, your average speed would obviously be greater than v.
So, either F(t)=v either we have 2 instants t0 and t1 (t0
F(t0)>v and F(t1)v
Since F is continuous on [t0, t1] there is a value t, to
So who is that Joe Einstein you're talking about ?
Anyway, I understand your anology, but I don't get your whole point (seems that you wanted to say several things at once or I'm just too tired)
Yes...
it is:
we have to instants to and t1 (to lt t1) and to and t1 within [0,T-1]
and with
F(t0) gt v and F(t1) lt v
or
F(t0) lt v and F(t1) gt v
so, since F is continuous on [t0,t1] there is a value t, t0 lt t lt t1 such that F(t)=v.
So, F(t)=v has at least one solution within [0,T-1] and the question is thus answered.
blablabla....
Just as a follow up to my theory, I looked at the actual paper (available here: http://pubs.acs.org/journals/nalefd/asap/pdf/nl015 606f.pdf ), and though I don't have the patience to actually read it, one of the diagrams shows the nanotobe in the order of 50 nm, about a hundred times bigger than the yahoo's "1/100,000 of a human hair". Damn sensationalists.
There's no reason for a sig here.
Well, no. Your parent is correct.
You only need NAND to do whatever you want.
NAND(A,A) => NOT(A)
NAND(NAND(A,A),NAND(B,B)) => OR(A,B)
etc..etc.. realy not that hard..
For most logic implementations, this is the way it is done. (although sometimes NOR is used instead).
Anyway, have a look at Randall Hyde's Art of Assembly for a source you can trust about it.
The idea is, NAND gates are cheaper than other gates, and it's easier to build logic structures with the same basic blocks.
The choreographed pace at which they're releasing this 'new' tech is such a stupid joke.
Read a few headlines down, (or up), where they're talking about successes in neuron/computer engineering techniques.
Oh, goody.
You do realize the League of Evil will require people to plug their brains in directly at some point? And the morons who suck up the Cyberpunk daydream where this is actually something desirable, (what? There are idiots like that present on Slashdot? Oh my!), are being used to buffer and in fact sell this horror to the world?
Yep. Sell it to the tech-heads, and you shape the world. The tech-heads have almost all the social muscle these days and not even they seem to fully realize it.
Why do you think it's so miserable to be alive if you live life as you have all been told? That is, working 8:00 to 6:00 jobs. Sucking up social programming which serves to render impotent relationships, one of the most powerful forces of stability and good energy; now perverted into over-sexed, short term, disappointing & miserable transactions. Thanks to James Cameron, the perfect boyfriend must now die of hypothermia in the North Atlantic, for crying out loud!
We've been programmed to eat unhealthy food with too many chemicals. Jeezus! Bread with everything. (There's almost no worse food combo out there!) Leading to poor health and further misery.
Enter the tech-heads.
Why do you think there have been so many episodes of Star Trek made with Holodeck fantasies? Do you think the Forces of Evil would allow such a virtuous show as Star Trek to exist if it wasn't the carrier for some toxin?
Grr.
Is nobody tuned into the same station as me? Am I the only one who can see this shit? Is nobody else scared out of their freeking minds? (Well, actually I'm not really all that scared; I'd describe my reaction as being something more akin to a fascination on an anthropological level. Watching exactly how the end of the world arrives is possibly the most amazing thing I'll ever see.)
Still, I can't believe that people are going to actually line up to be the first to plug their brains into the Matrix. Man! Now that is a sell job!
I mean, isn't face recognition in Borders Books already creepy enough? No! People want Microsoft and Echelon and **AMERICA** in their heads at night when they sleep! Digitize awareness! With everybody plugged into 'Friends' and 'Ally-McBeal,' nobody will even notice, much less rebel when the sky falls.
Part of me almost hopes that somebody does drop a vial by accident and wipes out 5.9 billion people on this globe. I'd almost rather take my chances at being one of the lucky survivors than continue watching this bullshit parade and the naivete of all the silly viewers.
-Fantastic Lad. The Craziest Fuck In ANY Room!
P.S. Most artists and media producers don't even realize where their ideas come from. Population control doesn't happen on a surface level anymore. Hasn't for a long, long time.
Not to detract from there accomplishment, I am sure they really did do it if they said they did it and this is really exciting stuff.
But IBM is not unaccustom to doing this sort of press release simply for the publicity of it.
I seem to remember a press release (which they had to buy add space to get it published I guess) back in the early 90's. 92 or 93 maybe. They claimed to have created the worlds first 1024 bit cpu.
I wouldnt suggest they are building this stuff for PR. I am just saying that is the purpose of the press release (just like most articles of this sort). Oh ya, someones cool project at IBM needs to keep getting funding of course.
Just dont assume it will be useable for anything practicle in OUR lifetime.
It took 20 years to get from 8 bit to 64 bit. And most of us use 32 bit just like we did 10 years ago.(this refers to commodity hardware, not the big iron).
Ah screw it.Never mind. Its cool stuff no matter what the press geeks do with it.
I think you underestimate just how much I just dont care.
For a source I can trust I'll look at a real designs which I do every day :)
/.ers reading something somewhere and thinking they know everything about the subject.
:P
:)
Oh
Art of Assembly? No thanks
Why not ? is it that bad ? Anyway, the book is at most introductive to logic, but it's still a good read.
This is the classic case of
This is the classic case of someone generalizing about slashdot.
First I don't think I know everything about something I don't practice everyday.
Second, I don't think I know everything about things I actualy practice everyday either. Neither should you.
blablabla
err.. alright,
hmmm AOI, and or invert
OAI or and invert
I don't think custom layout use only nand gates, and I didn't say so, I said NAND are the most comonly used blocks for circuits design.
I might be wrong I honestly don't witness it everyday
Still, that's what I learnt I school (though it was realy introductive, oh well, they always tell us they lied last year the year after don't they ?).
Anyway, the point was that having a NAND built out of ANDs and NOTS might be intuitive, it is not necesarily what happens at circuit design.
Using AOI gates to build XOR or whatever is a good example of the point I was trying to make.
So calm down, get some sleep, whatever...
In case you insist, the point was:
Basic building blocks aren't the one you might think, at least, not for the reason that was given. (boolean algebra operators, blablabla).
So I think, I heard it from several sources, that NAND gates are in fact the most used, for the given reasons that are very dependent of (time/technology/specific design/etc..)
If you tell me the earth is a ball because it's the best shape to fly in the air,
then I tell you earth doesn't fly in the air, and by the way, I have heard it is in fact a cube,
I'm obviously mistaken, and in the end, you might end being correct, but your logic was flawed anyway.
I see new devices with more easily controlled parasitic capacitance and inductance because of the dimensions of carbon nanotubes. This will be good for high frequency, high power applications as well as logic circuitry. Carbon nanotubes "want" to be certain sizes depending on the number of carbon atoms in a ring of the tube and the presence of dopants like boron or potassium. These things might make good diode laser drivers. Focused arrays of laser diodes could be an interesting way to nano-manipulate colloidal materials or proteins. Follow the links from here on Optical Tweezers.
It is now time to flip off your computer.
So now I need to call a quantum physicist to get tech support... great....
Get your Unix fortune now!
Call it what it is, a NOT gate.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
The most widely-used building block of modern computer circuits is the transistor. They come in 2 basic flavors, n-type and p-type. The difference, in layman's terms, is that n-types switch current on, and p-types switch current off. This was covered pretty well.
The computer world works in terms of binary logic functions, so we use transistors to build logic circuits. The simplest logic circuit that can be built is an inverter (NOT gate, etc). This takes 2 transistors (one of each type). Doing this on a molecule level is what IBM has just accomplished.
By itself, the NOT function is hardly useful, since it has only one input. To perform complex calculations, we use functions like OR, AND, NOR, NAND, XOR, etc, which have 2 inputs. As it turns out, the ones that human beings comprehend easily (AND and OR) are not the easiest to build, transistor-wise. NAND and NOR each require 4 transistors to build (two of each type), and have similar layouts. This is convenient because both functions (as mentioned) can be used exclusively to generate any possible binary function.
In practice, NAND gates are used most often in computer logic. Why? Although they are equally easy to build, the NOR gate requires you to stack two p-type transistors on top of each other. Due to their electrical characteristics, p-type transistors are significantly slower than n-type ones. Stacking them together only exacerbates the performance problem. Hence, we use NANDs whenever possible.
However, we still see a significant number of NOR gates in most computer architectures. The reason? NOR gates are the fundamental building block of flip-flops (a circuit that can "remember" a value), which are combined to make registers. Since RISC architectures tend to have a lot of registers (both visible and hidden in the pipeline system), we see plenty of NOR gates as well.
-- Brett
??? :)
I really don't see how this is different than what I was saying. (besides being more detailed)
:)
Oh well... doesn't matter
Thank me later when you wake up.
-Fantastic Lad
That you would ask that question in this context makes it pretty clear that you don't.
IOW, don't mistake my populist renaming of the ports as inexperience.
--Blair
How do "holes" move? When a hole moves, is it not actually an electron moving from one place to another -- leaving a new hole in the place where it left, and filling the hole in the place where it ends up?
If so, I don't see the difference between electrons carrying current and holes carrying current.
That that is is that that that that is not is not.