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Progress Toward Single Molecule Transistors
Fungii writes "There is an amazing story over at sciencedaily.com saying two research teams have managed to create single molecule transistors, looks like we don't have to worry about limitations on feature sizes for a while."
Remember that there are limitations to how small we can make circuits. If you put two molecular sized tranistors very close to gether, you will have major issues with tunneling.
This means very little on a practical level at the moment; it's more an indication of what's possible than anything we're going to see actually used in the next few years (IMHO). It's an ongoing question just how small a transistor can get and still be functional, and this seems to be an answer to that: it can get molecule-sized. Whether a molecule-sized transistor can or will be actually be usefully incorporated in any practical device is another question (well, technically it's two other questions).
At the very least a practical device using transistors that small would have to have a radically different design from present-day circuits, including vastly larger error-checking capabilities and probably some self-repairing abilities. Heat is a problem even now, and in circuits on this scale it wouldn't take much for the circuitry to literally shake itself apart. Quantum effects, which are negligible on today's scale, would introduce all kinds of errors into both the input and output of such small circuits if you tried to simply copy the same structure onto the smaller scale.
Speaking of which, the issue of actually hooking in I/O at such a scale is both a major hurdle for some applications, and a major possibility for practical use in others. For example, this is the kind of scale you'd want if you're going to try to splice more-or-less traditional electronic circuitry directly into fine nerves; when the electronic eyes currently just coming into being become fine-grained enough to support normal vision, they'd probably need extremely fine connections to individual nerve fibres in the retina.
This is a real wowser of a breakthrough, and major kudos rightfully go to both teams. It shows that there's a long way to go before transistor-type circuits can't be made smaller. By the time we actually get that far down the Rabbit Hole it's likely that we'll also have other information-processing techniques available, such as quantum computing (and this technology, once developed, might be just what is needed to usefully access the output of qubit-based systems).