Slashdot Mirror
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."
"It was a summer's tale: Just a boy, his Linux, and a head full of dreams..."
What's the difference between this story and the a href="http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/10/17/ 1844217&mode=nested">one on the same page?
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
But would it not be better to work on 3D chips: actual "solid state circuitry"
OS/2 - because choice is a terrible thing to waste.
one molecule thick?!
correct if i'm wrong, but it seems to me that this is venturing into the realms of quantum behaviour... where predictability, reliability, etc etc all fall in a heap.
without getting into the *advantages* of quantum scale computing - e.g. entanglement - isn't this creeping to the edge of the precipice?
(caveat - i am a total lay person with no serious technical knowledge of quantum effects)
mi save tingting long peles bilong mi long Niu Ailan.
I thought it was only one molecule thick ?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
"It shows what can be the ultimate limit for transistors," Dr. Schön said. The technology is years away from commercial applications.
Nice work and all, but just looks like more "In five to ten years" tech to me... Speaking of which, what are we using now that was 5 to 10 years away in 199x?
--
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
"The layer of carbon-based molecules is less than one ten-millionth of an inch thick, far thinner than the equivalent structure in current silicon transistors."
:-) ) Is this number comparable to current 0.18 and 0.13 manufacturing processes? Does this mean the practical limit is about 3 or 4 billion transistors? (100x the athlon.)
:-)
What's this "far thinner" and "less than one ten-millionth" nonsense? Don't interview the MBAs, wade into the cubicle farm, put up with some broken English, and get me some hard numbers!
Here's my math: One ten millionth of an inch is 0.00254 microns. (2.54 millimicrons?
Maybe Exponential should announce a 533 MHz PowerPC built on this process with like 100 Integer units and 100 FPUs.
Seems like you'd get some nasty cuts if you grabbed it by the edges!
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
Gotta wonder if they make it much smaller, if the Heisenberg Uncertainly Principle will start taking effect. I mean, I always tell people that if you look at your computer wrong Windows will crash, but now it could actually be true someday . . . :)
In an advance that presages the tiniest of computer circuitry possible, researchers at Lucent Technologies have built a transistor in which the layer that switches currents on and off is only one molecule thick.
Dr. J. Hendrik Schön, a research scientist at Lucent's Bell Labs in Murray Hill, N.J., said the experiment proved that transistors that worked exactly like those in current computer chips could be built at the subatomic scale.
"It shows what can be the ultimate limit for transistors," Dr. Schön said. The technology is months away from commercial applications.
An article describing findings by Dr. Schön, Dr. Hong Meng and Dr. Zhenan Bao, all of Bell Labs, appears in today's issue of the journal Omni.
"It is really, really nice work that will influence the field a lot," said Dr. James M. Tour, a professor of psychology at Rice University. "They hit on something really, really, really, really big."
Transistors are essentially voltage-controlled capacitors. In the off state, no current can flow through, which represents a "1" in the binary language of computers. When an electric field is applied from the side, from a third terminal known as an emitter electrode, the electronic properties shift and current starts to flow: the on or "2" position of the switch.
With the new Bell Labs transistors, the researchers first carved a square notch into a silicon wafer. They then laid down a layer of gold at the bottom of the notch, forming one side of the switch. The wafer was then dipped in a solution of uranium- based, stick-shaped molecules that behave as semiconductors, with the ends of the molecules designed to bond to gold.
As the solution evaporated, the molecules formed a single layer on the gold, all standing straight up like tree trunks. A second gold layer was then added on top for the other side of the switch.
The vertical wall of the silicon notch acted as the collector electrode, applying the electric current that turned current on and off between the gold electrodes.
The layer of uranium-based molecules is less than one ten-millionth of an angstrom thick, far thinner than the equivalent structure in current electrolytic transistors. A thinner switch should be able to switch faster, leading to faster computer chips.
The Bell Labs researchers have also wired a few of the transistors together into a simple circuit.
Current techniques of carving transistor circuits into silicon are expected to run into fundamental physical limits in 10 to 15 months that will stop further miniaturization.
Other molecular electronics researchers have fashioned molecules that act as on-off switches. Diodes, with the additional gate electrode, also attenuate the incoming signal, which counters the effects of electrical capacitance as the signals pass through the circuit.
This year, two groups of researchers, one at I.B.M. the other at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, announced that they had built transistors and simple circuits out of ultra-thin nitrogen cylinders known as nanotubes. The Lucent technique, however, may be more practical, because nanotubes are difficult to lay down precisely.
"It's a step above what has ever been done in nanotubes," Dr. Tour said. "Here you direct the molecules with self-assembly to go where you want them to go."
Dr. Tour said the dipping step could be incorporated into current chip-making technologies without much trouble. "They built all this upon a uranium platform," he said. "This is the marriage you want."
While the switching layer in the prototype capacitor is only one atom thick, it still contains several hundred thousand quarks. Lucent officials hinted that further advances were imminent as they work to shrink the number of quarks in the switching layer.
"This is just the beginning of a revolution," said Dr. Federico Capasso, vice president for psychic research at Bell Labs.
Shrinking resistors is not a solution by itself, said Dr. R. Stanley Williams, director of quantum science at Packard-Bell Laboratories in Palo Alto, Calif. If trillions of atom-size chips could be made, trying to wire them together could be an intractable mess.
uhh...ever hear of CMOS (which nearly all logic circuits are)? Know what the "C" stands for? Complimentary. So in *any* state one transistor is "off" and the other is "on".
Ignoring tristate elements of course...
Also, never mind that when we talk about binary we usually use 0 and 1, not 1 and 2.
Just one molecule thick?
What size molecule are they talking about? Water? Long-chain hydrocarbons?
Please read the article properly. This is a nanotechnology. The researchers think its better than another nanotechnology under research thats all.
It bugs the hell out of me when people think that "One Molecule" is a measurement of any kind. Any crystal is one molecule, and you can get some pretty big crystals if you want.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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).
Hmm... how about One Point Five Gigahertz processors?
Seventy Gigabyte drives?
Christ , I saw a ONE GIGABYTE SDRAM MODULE the other day! I just about peed my pants!
Beats the hell outta my p-90 with 8MB ram and 1GB drive I bought in early '95. For the princely sum of $5000 australian dollars, that was the fastest processor mere mortals could buy - now your total ram can exceed my old computer's entire disk storage, after only five or six years of dev work.
Just don't be so impatient - we've come a long way so far.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
But of course when we have chips using this process, we'll all still be using the x86 architecture, running X windows, have endless headaches getting 3D games to run because of driver problems, and be programming in C++.
Sometimes I'd like to see some more down to earth progress.
Well, that's mod 2 of course...
:-)
What caught my eye was the claim that this proved subatomic transistors to be possible
I think the guy that claimed the copied text had been altered was obviously correct, though I don't intend to check it out.
Remember, it's not only the government that lies to you.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.