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Lucent's New Chip Is Just One Molecule Thick
lotusFlow writes: "According to this NYTimes article, Lucent has developed a chip with a layer of transistors that is one molecule thick. This development is considered a new tep above nanotech because "here you direct the molecules with self-assembly to go where you want them to go." Commercial applications of this technology are years in the making, of course."
Quantum effects happen over distances that are significantly smaller than the 'diameter' of an electron, a couple orders of magnitude smaller than an atom, much less a 60+ molecule buckytube.
It may not be just, but it is fair, and that is more important.
If memory serves from reading the original Bell Labs report (posted here just yesterday), the molecule was some form of sulfide-phenyl bridge.
[Dusting off chemistry text]
So, if you're scoring that at home, it looks like this:
-S-Phenyl-Phenyl-S-
This would give it a molecular weight of 216 and a length on the order of 10 nanometers, or 0.01 microns. Not too much smaller than 0.18 or 0.13 process chips, but the self-assembly and inexpensiveness of the materials look like the real winning points here.
Dave
http://www.psrc.usm.edu/macrog/nonlin.htm
do "Find" for bowling, it says so on there. =) (And yes, its a valid site)
I SURVIVED THE GREAT SLASHDOT BLACKOUT OF 2002!
Please read the article properly. This is a nanotechnology. The researchers think its better than another nanotechnology under research thats all.
CMOS. = Complementry Metal Oxide Semiconductor. This is relatively slow and expensive, but it retains its state when there is no power, hence its use in Bios memory. Most circutry is done in doped silicon.
Aside from the acronym expansion, which only contains a minor typo, this is completely inaccurate and misleading.
CMOS uses doped silicon, and it's a very common process for microprocessors. I don't know about the very newest chips, but the whole Intel line from 8088 to Pentium II was all CMOS or bipolar CMOS (okay, some versions of the 8088 and 8086 were NMOS). It's cheap and fast.
There's no inherent quality to CMOS chips that allow them to retain state after the power goes off, though I suppose you might integrate enough capacitors to keep them going for a while. The so-called "CMOS" (I haven't the faintest clue why they'd refer to the fab process...) settings of your computer are sustained by a battery (or were... maybe the newer ones use flash RAM or something).