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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."
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?
...to even see a beowulf cluster of these ;)
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?"
Once it starts to break down for silicon-transistor circuits, the "capacity" metrics will be transferred to whatever follows.
The interesting thing about Moore's law is that it may be unprovably vague.
Einstein posed a theorem he said he never could prove:
How this relates to Moore's law is if you replace distance with transistor count, then along the way you will find intervals where you have doubled the transistor count in 18-24 months.
This feature allows hypesters every once in a while to prove to themselves that "it still works" to whatever precision they desire.
But they're not entirely dishonest, since this only works because Moore's law has a long-term stable average.
--Blair
...but does it run Linux?
fear my zig!
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.
Gain is a common figure of merit of transistor-based amplifier circuits. The gain of a voltage amplifier is defined as the ratio of the size of the output signal to the size of the input signal. An amplifier that could take a 0.5V amplitude sine wave as its input and produce a 5V amplitude sine wave as its output has a gain of 10. You don't get something for nothing, of course - the amplifier has to be connected to an external power source.
A transistor is a three-terminal device. In a typical computer chip, these three terminals are called the source, the drain, and the gate. For a given voltage between the source and drain, the current that flows into the drain is strongly dependent on the voltage applied to the gate. That's what allows transistors to be used as switches: you can make a transistor that won't let current flow from source to drain unless the gate voltage is turned up past some value.
Achieving actual gain in a single-molecule device is important. Without gain greater than one, it's not possible to efficiently chain large numbers of transistors together to manipulate signals. A strong input would get degraded with each stage of transistor manipulation, eventually falling to a level too small to drive subsequent transistors.
There are *many* problems with the idea of using individual molecules to replace Si devices. Achieving a gain > 1 is a necessary but by no means sufficient step for eventual molecule-based computers. As a physicist, I think it's important to recognize real achievements in this field, but not to buy into the hype unquestioningly.
100,000 times thinner than a human hair
There is hope for us blonds yet.
Just tell me big the damn thing is in regular units: meters, angstroms, astronomical units, whatever.
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?
How does this affect the recent discussions about Moore's law ?
It doesn't affect them much. It's good to have a proof of concept for a nanotube NOT gate, but it leaves open questions of manufacturing and connectivity which would be crucial to creating a real technology from this kind of circuit element. I don't think anyone doubted that nanoscale gates were possible, but what is more questionable is how they can be economically assembled and effectively interconnected.
Tim
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..."
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.
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
Call it what it is, a NOT gate.
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
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