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Sandia Builds Micromechanical 'Device Driver'
DanielRavenNest writes: "Sandia Labs has built a tiny bicycle chain type drive out of silicon. This allows one micromechanical motor to drive multiple devices scattered about a chip."
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Other than that this stuff is made out of silicon, I don't know much about these devices. Are they etched like integrated circuits? And here's what baffles me...If they're etched, how in the heck can they actually make gears and stuff spin and move around?
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Can I stick a baseball card on it, and hear the racket? All the neighborhood geeks will be so jealous...Hey, this Mickey Mantle isn't worth anything, is it?
Not every task will be suited to a solid state solution. Some will require mechanistic activity or (another alternative to solid state) biological activity. In the case of things like nanites that are going to navigate throughout the body and do stuff, this kind of thing could be useful (or a springboard to something useful).
:)
But my first thought was "once they have the chain, then they can build the nano-cycle... but where will they find all those itsy-bitsy Clowns? And how many can dance on the head of a pin?"
All right, I probably do need therapy
-- Mal: "Well they tell you: never hit a man with a closed fist. But it is, on occasion, hilarious."
Here's Google's mirror, since it looks like this site was /.'ed.
The application that Sandia has given, at least in the past, for their micromachine efforts is better locks for nuclear warheads. So, the analogy that the article makes to sewing machine factories only makes sense if they were nuclear sewing machines.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
here (free regblah.)u its/10NEXT.html
AND for cut and pasters: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/10/technology/circ
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
this is great news for the little computer elves that do all the calculations in my computer. They've been slaving away on their abicii for years, now i can buy them bicycles with nano-chains and stuff!
This is just cool. One can think of all kinds of applications for this. Even dumb ones. I do agree it could have uses in military technology as well.
Could they use this to build motors in the top of chips and come up with some sort of package that allows the nano (and hopefully silent) fans to cool a CPU? Just a thought.
Gorkman
I'm not terribly well informed on how these things work on chips currently. How much smaller will chips really become if you were to put several shafts to such a chain? And just how reliable would would of these chains be when hooked to multiple shafts? A friend of mine told me once that the chains weren't currently put on multiple shafts because they wouldn't handle the stress, so is this smaller chain really going to make chips smaller?
Disclaimer. I could be completely wrong on everything here. I am ignorant of circuitry.
Slackware forever. Honestly, what else would you trust when it absolutely positively has to be stable, secure, and easy
All you need to do is lithograph a 2-micron long hairpin, and that sucker's yours!!!
Consider hooking this thing up to a Brownian Ratchet, such as discribed by Feynman in his lectures. (For those not familiar with a Brownian Ratchet, this page give a good introduction and a cool Java thingy to play with. See also R.D. Astumian: Thermodynamics and Kinetics of a Brownian Motor, Science 276, p. 917-922 (1997). Essentially, it works like a very small, normal ratchet. Molecules in the atmosphere hit the system randomly. Sometimes it goes "forward," but it cannot go against the ratcheting mechanism - "backwards" is locked out. So you get a net forward motion on the ratchet essentially for free from the atmosphere.)
Connect the Brownian Ratchet to this little chain thingy. Have it wind something up. User presses button, and thingy unwinds. Basically a free recharging system.
Not all that practical, but pretty cool. I'm sure there are better applications... (anyone?)
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
The Ultra-micro-featherweight class of robot wars! (Or battlebots, or robotica, or whatever)
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
This looks a whole lot like devices from the Planiverse...makes sense, since they are essentially dealing multiple two-dimensional layers. If you haven't read "The Planiverse", I suggest you do so...fascinating book.
Is it just me, or should they work on rectifying the oval gear problem next?
will be necessary to keep it from gunking up.
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
or going in circles shouting "Kernel Panic" or something.
Just an image. Tron with bicyles ;-)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Micro-Lego Mindstorms
My mom is an engineer at SNL, and I try to go once a year when they have their open house for families. The place is packed with stuff just as cool as this - supercomputers, particle colliders, nanotech, rockets and sattelites, I could go on and on. Really an amazing place - reading about it doesn't compare to seeing it in person. I highly recommend visiting if you get the chance.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
This reminds me of the last time I went to have dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory in Toronto. Their lounge has about six old ceiling fans, all driven by the same motor, connected by chains.
We all know what happened to that technology.
This might prove to be a good stepping-stone, but I think the end result will be a motor on everything that moves.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Now instead of one big honkin noisy fan, we can have the same noisy motor drive zillions of lil itty bitty fans (imagine if every little vent hole in your computer had a fan in it wheeeeee). Or maybe a huge wall full of these, would be safer to stick your finger into that then a big cut-your-finger-off fan.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
Research isn't always about solving problems. But it's always about coming up with new ideas.
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Computer, knit me a jersey, bit two perl one :-)
How do you oil the chain?
If the chain breaks do you bend a valve?
Just look at those gears. Man, with technology like that we can finally reduce Babbage's Analytical Engine to something that'll fit on a chip.
Now that's a microcomputer!
-- Alastair
The Brownian Ratchet you describe won't work, because of the second law of thermodynamics. The second law is potent enough that even evoking Feynman's name won't make it go away. Besides, what Feynman described was why this won't work.
See Chapter 46 of the Lectures if you want the details, but in short, it would quickly get hot enough that its own shaking (heat=random motion remember?) would drown out the Brownian motion.
-- MarkusQ
This is going to use one tiny chainbreaker :P
"You win again Gravity!" -Futurama (Zapp)
Microscopic device that you eat. It swims around in you like a submarine, communicates by tiny radio waves, can even take grainy, tech looking pictures to show doctors whats going on in side you.
Tiny little bot with one of those chem detectors. Attach it to a tiny bit of iron. It floats around in a solution and when it finds a molecule of the type you're looking for it grabs ahold. Now you can seperate two things that were presumably not seperable before.
Tiny machine that traces around circuits that have gone defective and actually repairs them through some magic. The little devices follow the paths until they come to a problem they can repair.
My personal goal device actually has nothing to do with chains, but is a microscopic audio recorder that becomes permanently attached to your ear. It records everything you hear giving you perfect memory! Powered by body heat so you don't switch batteries, no bulky tapes, saves the data to disk at the end of the day. Suddenly my bad memory is no longer a handicap!
These little gadgets are so small that it is possible to make them out of a single, faultless piece of material. Okay, if you had a dislocation or an inclusion in your bike chain, then it would fail pretty quickly, if it worked at all; but if you get a good one, then it will seem almost immortal when compared to macroscopic objects. So, you make a few spares, and throw away the duds.
We are used to seeing silicon and silicon dioxide as crystalline. However, if you take out the small features that allow a crack to propagate through a crystal, then these materials can seem very tough and flexible. Think of glass fibres and glass. The Sandia site used to have a downloadable video of a minature moving mirror getting trodden on by a flea: it bends but does not crumple, and springs back unharmed.
There are other changes as you get to submicron sizes. Surface tension and other chemical effects seem huge. Water drops seem to have a tough skin on them at this scale, and drops will sit on a surface rather than wet it. This is just as well: a water drop could glue the chain together if it could wet. As things are, these gadgets seem to survive in the open atmosphere just fine.
If you think that is weird, the nanoscale stuff is much weirder. Interesting times, or what?
The Brownian Ratchet you describe won't work, because of the second law of thermodynamics.
... something we do with batteries all the time.
Not really. Energy is taken from the motion of the atmosphere. It is free in economic, not physical, terms, and is therefor not a violation of the 2nd law.
In other words, it is not a closed system he is describing, but an open system where energy is introduced (from the molecular motion of the atmosphere, which in turn is powered by the sun).
Furthermore, heating issues can be handled in the way they are handled in any electrical or mechanical system (in this case decoupling the ratchet, using active cooling, or whatever). Besides, chances are something like this is being used to charge a more mundane battery (converting mechanical energy to electical, which involves loss of energy, then converting the stored energy back to electricity, which involves another loss, and so on).
All well within the laws of thermodynamics. Innovative, and "free" in the sense that atmospheric motion, powered by the cost-free energy of the sun, is free. Not at all free in terms of thermodynamics or entropy, as energy is being introduced from outside and then simply stored in some fashion, at a net loss in terms of total energy
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
... it is powered by the sun. So fuck the damn creationists, doomsday get my gun" (to borrow a phrase from MC Hawking).
There is nothing mystical about the physical infrastructure of human intelligence. We derive our energy from the food we eat (in a very ineffecient manner), much of which in turn (at some point) derives its energy from photosynthesis, which in turn derives its energy from the sun, an energy source external to the earth (and one which will, some day, run out).
We are powered by the sun, in other words, not some mystical force violating Thermodynamic's second law. Our intelligence may have other implications, but a mystical violation of the basic laws of physics isn't one of them.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
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