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Self-Assembling Nanocomputers
A Semi-Anonymous Coward writes: "According to this article a researcher at Harvard University has developed techniques for self assembly of nanoscale wires that operate without resistance due to a property called ballistic conductivity. He hopes the research will provide an 'end run' around convential top-down circuit designs, allowing much smaller, faster and more energy efficient computers."
...when I read articles like this I tend to get really excited about the cool tech and the possiblities that they offer. However, it will take a long time for Startling New Advances to make it into our daily lives. People have speculated on the suppression of technology by the government or industry -- but the truth is, it takes a long time for technology to be adopted by a manufacturer. No conspiracies necessary, just a simple fact of economics. How many garage semiconductor factories do you know of? It takes an incredible amount of resources to fund a foundry like AMD or Intel... our combined buying power influences companies like them but only on a 5 quarter plan. Their vision is narrowed down to what works NOW, what can they afford NOW to make more money later... What they demand are deliverables, which is exactly what the Harvard article spoke about. They have created a transistor 10 atoms across. Great, they can now get funding and see what else can be done. Until a process is developed which can be reproduced with the same yield as first generation flat panel displays, that is, when they figure out how to make things cheaply and reliably that are fundamentally useful, with a minimal amount of failures... major manufacturers won't be going near this or any other breakthrough technology. You see, that's what funding is for! To find out if it can yield something useful.
:: It isn't illegal to dream. Dreams can become visions which guide our actions today. Together we forge the future.
I am interested in how they fare with packing together multiple transistors, like one for red, another for blue, another for green...oh yeah the resolution would be phenominal. Might it also be possible for this to lead to display devices we popped onto our eyes like contacts?
So yeah, it gets discouraging when you think about everything that is possible with what humans know, and compare that with what you can actually buy. Just try to think outside the 5 quarter plan.
Remember
Optical based circuts
are practical,afordable, and constructable with current technology.
Best of all rudimentry optical circuts have
been used for some computing components such as
the orange macro powerbook excelerator
HUGE number decompilers etc.
On top of all this the could use 90% of the light spectrum thus allowing for at circtus aproaching the speed of light PER a spectrum.
No need for nanites other than style points then.
The circuits will have zero resistance only when they are in a stable state. Your static memory will not consume power provided you don't try and read it. Unfortunately, most interesting bits of computing will involve changing the electronic states, so there will still be power consumption, and trouble getting rid of heat.
Carbon will probably be the new silicon. It has a big 10eV band gap, and you can make it a resistor, a semiconductor, a conductor, or a superconductor by rearranging the bonds, without doping. If we can crack the self-assembly problems, then you may get a mole of bits in a few tens of grammes of material. Which may not be instantaneous calculations for no energy, but it is pretty good to be going on with.
Making a whole computer is also possible, but this may take a little longer.
Self-assembly is very cool. Unfortunately this isn't an example.
He mixes the components together but then pours them onto a matrix. Then he mixes the next one and pours that on the previous one. So still cool, but not "self-assembling"
Self-assembling structures like proteins and DNA do exist, and are more useful. DNA is an example of a structure which includes positional info (i.e. addressing) which an earlier poster indicated would be important.
Likely a cell is a good example of an ideal machine. It's very complex, but it includes power source, self-maintenance and assembly. These little parts he's building (they're not even "machines" yet) don't address these issues.