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."

Comments

Re:English, please?

[Compuser]

Current scale for transistors is about 90 nm
(current production technology is 130 nm).
Single molecule transistor scale would be 1 nm.
So oversimplifying a bit, this is 100 times
smaller than current tech.

Very high

[Futurepower(R)]

The physics is such that the theoretical frequency response must be very high. The only problem could be capacitance on the input. I wonder about the gain, also.

The future of software engineering.

[ken_mcneil]

As processing power increasse to 10-100 times what it is now, what will the role of software developers become? Will the additional power allow developers to ignore perfomance more and more, and focus on correctness and features? Or, will developers tackle bigger and bigger problems, and therefore require better asymptotic performance of their algorithms? I don't think computer science will ever die, but it's something to think about.

Yup, wiring is the issue

[WillWare]

This is one of the big problems. People have been coming up with switching devices for a while now. It's been done with rotaxane , it's been done with nanotubes. As you point out, the really tricky problem is specific wiring.

Some programmable logic technologies handle wiring with a uniform sea of logic gates connected by fuses, and you create a particular logic circuit by selectively blowing fuses. The HP/UCLA rotaxane work involves essentially the same idea, using molecular switches at the intersections of a 2D grid of molecular wires. In addition to some discussion here on Slashdot, there is more at Nanodot, and a fairly extended discussion on sci.nanotech.

Solving the problem of routing specific wires to specific gates, and doing it in a way that's reliably manufacturable in mole quantities, will pretty much relegate today's foundries to niche markets. But that's probably a long way off, numerous problems to solve to get there. Interesting times ahead.