Cascading Molecules Drive IBM's Smallest Computer

Benoit Fries writes "EE Times reports that IBM researchers have created a simple computation engine that's more than 250,000 times smaller than the most advanced silicon circuitry. Called the world's smallest computer, the system relies on a 'molecular cascade' that pushes a handful of carbon monoxide molecules across a copper surface to perform digital logic functions. 'Even if CMOS density follows Moore's Law for 40 more years, molecular cascades are still going to be smaller,' they said."

Comments

Re:Think Smarter - new IBM motto

[Anonymous Coward]

How bout this...do both. Smaller computers can only be a good thing

big deal

[Zod000]

'Even if CMOS density follows Moore's Law for 40 more years, molecular cascades are still going to be smaller,'

Chances are it'll be more than 40 years until they could make an actual product with this technology so I don't think that I'm going to hold off on getting that new conventional cpu quite yet

Size is great and all...

[RyMon]

but what about the speed?

"The slow operation of the gates -- some required seconds to settle -- underscores the fact that the work was part of a research project."

You pretty much have your choice of one chip that does something 250,000 times in a second, or 250,000 chips that do one thing each a second... Until they can speed these things up, they're more of a curiosity than a useful technology.

Re:Think Smarter - new IBM motto

[joto]

And exactly how will you achieve massive parallelism without packing more logic per area? Making computers as big as houses again is not the answer.

Re:Hmm

[joto]

Well, only if your city is about the size of something you can only see in a microscope, and the computer is really large and complex, and you somehow manages to get the CO-molecules off the copper plate by cutting the power.

Re:Benchmarks please

[drinkypoo]

LoCs are annoying for the same reason as SpecInt... the aforementioned changing from year to year. You look at marketing literature for a 24 processor SGI Challenge XL and it's in, say, SpecInt94, and then you look at a 8 processor Xeon or something and it's SpecInt98 or whatever... For chrissake pick some reasonable unit.

Re:Computing model

[wmspringer]

I dunno..they may be down to computing with molecules, but quantum computers use yet smaller particles, and are probably faster. Why have ten billion teeny atoms solving a problem in a couple seconds, when you can have one molecule solve the problem all possible ways in less time?

Re:hmmm... quantum effects

[teaserX]

Close. I think you mean "quantum level" or "sub-atomic level". On a molecular scale things still follow the laws of classical physics.

<scold>

Go look up the difference between "quantum" and "molecular" levels and start your post over.

</scold>

Nobody knows yet...

[Goonie]

Maybe this won't have *any* practical applications. It's pure research. Maybe it'll sit in a journal for 20 years before some young postgrad will read it, realize that because of (insert random other advances here) he or she can use that technology to {control nanobots, build a beowulf cluster on a chip, implant it in people's brains}.

Kind of like when Alexander Fleming wrote up a journal paper back in 1928(?) about how mould killed bacteria, and Walter Florey found it in a literature search a decade later and set his research team to isolate the responsible compound and figure out how to produce it in bulk.

I've had this experience myself. I needed to find an efficient algorithm for a relatively obscure problem. The usual textbooks didn't help, but I finally located a survey paper which finally revealed a 1981 journal article which described exactly the algorithm I was looking for.