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The Nanomechanical Computer
eldavojohn writes "The BBC is reporting on a newly proposed type of nanomechanical computer that mimics J. H. Müller & Charles Babbage's work on mechanical computational devices — just on a much smaller scale. The paper is published today in the New Journal of Physics and cites three reasons to build a computer with nanomechanical transistors over bipolar-junction or field-effect transistors: '(i) mechanical elements are more robust to electromagnetic shocks than current dynamic random access memory based purely on complimentary metal oxide semiconductor technology, (ii) the power dissipated can be orders of magnitude below CMOS, and (iii) the operating temperature of such an NMC can be an order of magnitude above that of conventional CMOS.'"
The paper claims to have shown how to make a nano-mechanical computer using contemporary silicon production facilities. I've gotta wonder, what are you waiting for? Pay the $10,000.. send off your image to be made and test the damn thing.
This is like half science.. "Here's my hypothesis, someone test it for me."
How we know is more important than what we know.
Neal Stephenson wrote a book about this kind of tech back in 1995 or so, entitled "The Diamond Age" (or "A Young Girl's Primer or something like that). He envisions some pretty incredible stuff made out of this tech. Great book, lots of nerdy CS-type stuff in it. Go to the library and pick it up, very fun stuff. I think this one of his works is very underrated. If we can actually engineer stuff like this it would be impressive, indeed.
Intel transfer the difficult from Hadware to software, for get more power, programmer need more technology. -- chinaitn
"Order of magnitude" is a pretty silly phrase to use in this context. From the paper: "The operating temperature can be as high as 500C." So I guess they're using Celsius as the scale, not absolute temperature.
This present design is a cool idea. I don't want to take anything away from the presented concept, but I thought it would be important to point out previous work on nanomechanical computers. First of all, Eric Drexler (the guy who popularized the term "nanotechnology" and who basically invented the field now known as molecular nanotechnology) has been advocating the concept of nanomechanical computers for many years now (they are described in his book Engines of Creation (1986) and detailed feasibility calculations, and rough schematics, are presented in his book Nanosystems (1992)). Drexler has been trying to get people on-board with his very foreward-looking ideas for nanotechnology: where nano-sized mechanical systems would be performing computation, and controlling chemical reactions with a precision that currently only biological systems can achieve. (It should be noted that current work in "nanotechnology" is hilariously primitive compared to what Drexler intended the term to describe.) Drexler's vision of nano-mechanical systems has been challenged by many people, most notably by Richard Smalley (the guy who discovered buckyballs).
Beyond Drexler's theoretical work, carbon nanotubes were demonstrated as nano-mechanical transistors in 2000. Basically, the nanotube was positioned over various electric pads. A current could be applied to mechanically deform the nanotube. The deformation was stable, and could be read-out by measuring current across the tube. Since the deformation was stable and reversible, the tubes could be used as persistent storage or as switching/logic elements. In fact, switching speeds of gigahertz were demonstrated. The vision was to have long nanotubes in a huge cross-bar architecture, leading to high-density persistent storage. As is often the case, scale-up was difficult.
This present work appears to pattern a nano-sized post between conducting pads (out of a gold/silicon layered system) , and to use that post as a single-electron transistor. The 'mechanical' part comes from mechanically coupling multiple pillars to use as a gain mechanism for a transistor. This is basically much closer to conventional micro-lithography, and as such, it should fit in with current lithographic infrastructure much more easily than the nanotube concept did.
anyone?
I remember the notion of building Babbage engines at a molecular scale at some point in the future being brought up in an electrical engineering course I took in the mid 1990's, and it probably wasn't a particularly new notion even then. Granted, we're certainly closer to being able to actually do it now than we were in 1996, but it's still not a new idea.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I keep seeing a miniaturized, massively parallel array of Dr. Nims.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dr._NIM
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Anybody remember the mechanical nanotech in the book "Cassini Division"? Though they did that as a protective sandbox measure against supersapient AI and uplifted humans...
I'm sure for some applications these will be better than traditional electronics.
For other applications they won't be.
The ideas aren't new, but there are probably some legitimate patents to be had in the particulars. That thought should help drive venture capital.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Specifically, The Diamond Age, where such specifically mechanical nanomachines, along with artificial diamond, define the era the book takes place in. I'd say it's a charming if hyper-technical story if you haven't read it - though, things get rather unsafe for some young children in terms of strong sexuality for one prominent subplot.
Anyway, the machines aren't self-replicating, but they are fabricated in microwave-style (and larger) boxes that take an elemental 'feed' of organic compounds and data. The book has some great philosophical and social content, and breaks most of the annoying characteristics of the previous 'cyberpunk'-style writing.
Ryan Fenton
It may be a more robust transistor when dealing with shocks or heat, but I wonder if the same claim can be made for material wear. They'd be some diamond-like carbon structure, sure, but do we really know how robust those would be under such conditions (billions of jitters/sec rubbing against other pieces)? It could cause part wear or moving of parts, I would think....
Still, good on 'em....
They're far from the first to propose nanomechanical computing machines like Babbage's original (and failed) machines. A mentor of mine explained to me in 1990 an idea of building nanoscale rod logic in orbit: microgravity, vacuum, solar power. And I don't think he was the first to think of it.
I'll be impressed when someone actually builds some. Or writes a lot more engaging science fiction than the BBC just published.
--
make install -not war
http://www.google.com/search?q=crapfloodtroll
From my collection:
* Nanotechnology information [archived] [2002]
* Bibliography of nanotechnology and nanoscience [pdf] [2004]
* Brad Hein's nanotechnology website
* Ned Seeman's DNA nanotech bibliography
* MEMS/nanotech reading list
* Even more publications in nanotechnology
* sci.nano archives
* The open micro/nano-manufacturing project
* Nanotech in scifi
And if anybody has links on nanomechanical synthesis, that'd be much appreciated. IIRC, nanolithography is one of the main areas of development, along with nonlinear optics to get the required precision manufacturing.
If the Nikei stock exchange uses a mechanical computer, then an earthquake in Japan will really send a shudder through the financial markets...
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Charles Babbage has been both a hero and anti-hero of mine for almost three decades now, ever since I researched and wrote a paper about him in high school. I immediately saw both his best and worst traits in my own behavior, and on the worst side it led to me referring to myself as "pulling a Babbage" whenever I let those traits get the better of me. I now have a string of unfinished projects to my name that certainly eclipses what Babbage did.
Well, I guess the retro-futuristic cathode tube computers in the Fallout series will be trumped by an even more retro-ish mechanical processing power...
"This is like half science.. "Here's my hypothesis, someone test it for me.""
Little different than "Here's my slashdot rant, now go and die for my revolution".
welcome our Nanomechanical overlords...
It's an interesting concept, but it is not in any way a "new" concept. It was, for example, explored in Drexlers "Engines of Creation" that is (in full) available online under http://www.e-drexler.com/ EOC was first published in 1986, so the idea is more than 20 years old.
1. Funny that you should mention that, given that Babbage, get this: never actually finished his machine, so he never actually delivered any value for the ample funding money he received. Other people get into the v2.0 syndrome after they completed one successful project. Babbage couldn't be even arsed to finish the first one (although, again, he did receive more than enough funding for it) before he started designing the second version. Then the third. Then the fourth. What is now known collectively as the Analytical Engine is actually a whole series of different machines: he could never be arsed to actually finish building one before he got distracted and started the next one. He kept at it until his death.
His machines _would_ have worked, if they had actually been completed. But he could never be arsed to. Whenever he got funding for one, he'd deliver exactly nothing for that money.
So, you know, maybe _that_ is why Babbage found the Englishmen somewhat reluctant to invest in his designs. Had he actually finished the Differential Engine, maybe people would have been more receptive to his next ideas. Maybe instead of bitching about his fellow Englishmen, it would have been easier to just deliver what he had promised. Just a thought.
And maybe we would have had programmable computers a lot earlier. But as it is, it took people like Konrad Zuse in Germany or Alan Turing and the other folks who built the Colossus computer in the UK, to get it started. Because they actually delivered something that worked. Bloody huge difference there.
2. The complaint about "slicing pineapple" is actually invalid too. Like many nerds today, Babbage was in it just for the fun of researching something new, and apparently thought that people should give him a lot of money just so he can have some nerdy fun.
Capitalism, even the 19'th century kind -- actually, _especially_ the 19'th century kind -- doesn't work that way. To get some funding, the question you must answer is, basically, "which of _my_ problems does this solve?" If that company is in the business of slicing pineapple, then, yes, a machine which peels potatoes is completely useless to them.
Governments too, while they do fund some fundamental research too, have a fiscal responsibility to the citizens they tax for that money. Especially in the 19'th century laissez-faire ideology, when the government was lean, mean, and barely funded to maintain the army. You can't seriously propose a tax hike just so Mr Babbage can play with something cool and high tech. So basically they too have to ask, "ok, so what do _I_ gain from this? Does it compute ballistics for our battleships? Total the census? Or what?"
You'll notice that the working examples that did get computing started, had a satisfactory answer to exactly that. The Colossus computer broke enemy codes for the UK army, and Zuse's machines did aerodynamics calculations for the German airforce. E.g., the Z2 was used to design glide bombs.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
From TFA: "The researchers are currently building the first elements needed for the computer, focusing initially on transistors, the basic switches at the heart of all computers." Insightful? My ass.
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
I suspect that what is being thought of is actually relay technology - so let's call it a Turing/Von Neumann/Mauchly approach (Alan Turing was a pioneer of relay logic among his other achievements, and Von Neumann and Mauchly were both associated with relay calculators.) Although relay computers were effectively obsolete by the 70s, they persisted in industrial controls for longer because (a) they could be debugged by electricians and (b) they could tolerate levels of contamination that destroyed the electronics of the period. The last generation of ultra-clean sealed relays and mercury relays were extremely durable and reliable. They didn't have the power handling, size for size, of power transistors but they had less internal dissipation. As a simple example, I was designing equipment in the late 80s which had to switch a few watts at around 500VDC. Although there are transistors that can handle these voltages, the design of the switching circuit necessitated a hybrid device costing around $200. A suitable relay cost $10 and was immune from punchthrough.
I'm prepared to guess that there will be niche applications for these ideas - but as with the IC engine, the sheer accumulated R&D in electromechanical systems will mean that widespread adoption will never be economic. It's easier to duct cold air over an engine management system (as on my car, with a few $ of plastics) than it is to redesign the entire chain from logic to actuator to use a different technology. And the current density of flash memory suggests that the hill to be scaled by electromechanical memory is enormous. Back in the days when flash chips were 256 bytes and not too reliable, there might have been a chance. Now when 8GByte USB dongles are cheap and reliable, it will be a lot harder.
Pining for the fjords
The research presented in this article reminds me of a an abstract I read a while back about a team who developed an on chip vacuum tube micro-triode which used carbon nanotubes as field emitters. It might not be possible to build a computer out of them, but logic built from them would have some of the same advantages mentioned in TFA (high immunity to electromagnetic radiation, etc.)i el5/16/21940/01019936.pdf
Link (warning PDF) http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/Xplore/login.jsp?url=/
Wrong, actually. The machine that was built at the end of the 20'th century was built with the precision and tolerances of the 19'th century. Deliberately, to show that it was possible.
The precision argument is even more obviously false, when you look at the fact that very precise watches had existed for a long time. That's how they measured longitude before GPS. I use watches as an example, because they're cog-based machines too, and they required even higher precision. By the middle of the _18'th_ century (i.e., a century earlier than Babbage) even a pocket watch would already not deviate more than a minute per day, and the second hand gradually became common. (Previously they tended to have only hours and minutes hands.)
The first practical nautical clock, John Harrison's H4 was first used aboard the ship Deptford which set sail for Jamaica on 18 November 1761 and actually arrived there on 19 January 1762. That's two months and a day at sea. After all that time, it was only off by 5.1 seconds.
_That_ is the kind of accuracy that was already available a century before Babbage.
Babbage's design didn't even need that kind of accuracy, since it was essentially a digital device. All that mattered was how many teeth of the cog had moved, not also to do it within a very exact time interval. Half the sources of inaccuracy of a watch, didn't even apply there.
So, no, Babbage had no excuse. The production capabilities were there, the precision was enough, and standardization wasn't even necessary for a prototype. He just couldn't be arsed to actually deliver what he promised. Full stop.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Firefox has become very slow on my system with four or five tabs open. Sometimes I scream out I'd wish this browser were executed by steam. I keep my fingers crossed for this technology.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I'm just very tired of mass media overhyping engineering that may have almost no effect on most people. It leads to cynicism of the "what happened to my flying car" variety.
Pining for the fjords
But aren't mechanical shocks more common for your typical computer? And won't these machines take far more damage from them than current solid-state ram?
I am trolling
I understand this machine as being nano-electro-mechanical, i.e. some sort of relay computer. However, I don't understand how it could be that it uses less power compared to CMOS at equal switching speeds. Accelerating mass is costly, much more so for nuclei then electrons.
I know this is /. and actually reading the article is unusual, but *I* did and came upon this:
A computing architecture made from nanomechanical transistors thus is competitive with 45 nm CMOS technology Note 2, while taking a step towards enabling reversible computing. (emphasis added)I would LOVE to see THAT happen!
<dream>Whenever a program crashes, just open the debugger, run it backwards until it gets "weird". Run it forwards and backwards again to isolate where it's broken. Of course, there are some problems with asynchronous signals (disk I/O, keyboard, mouse, etc.) but I can dream, can't I?</dream>
But seriously, could this just be something thrown in to help get more funding or is it an actual possibility?
If I interpret TFA and its references (which are more useful even just as abstracts) correctly, this is not at all the "rod logic" of Stephenson/Babbage fame. It is a single transistor, built out of two metal terminals (source and drain) and a tall, thin pillar standing between them which vibrates like a tuning fork (at 300MHz - 1GHz or so).
This pillar can be charged from the terminals and by transferring charge it can switch the current. This nano-electromechanical single electron transistor (NEMSET) was invented by other researchers, TFA mainly explores electronic properties of the NEMSET and how to put them together into circuits, create circuit elements, etc. but they didn't really do any of it yet.
Mainly it can run at high temperatures, is not as fast as ordinary transistors, but seems like it could offer multivalued logic not just binary, and as for power just about anything will do, including self-excitation, environmental vibration, etc.
So while this might be just the thing for making a laptop you can use without frying your gonads, it is not what one might think when hearing the words "nanomechanical computer".
A beowolf cluster of these ...
Someone had to say it!!
'Only a Barbarian believes that his tribes customs are the laws of nature'
Maybe in the future the internets really will be made of tubes or dump trucks!
See Engines of Creation.
... a teeny tiny beowulf cluster of these!
We figured out a long time ago that it's easier to elect seven judges than to elect 132 legislators.
The reason is that Absolute Zero is a concept that doesn't really exist in nature. Nor does, for all practical purposes, much of the range 'below zero'. Furthermore, to speak of temperature in terms of 'magnitude' and to speak of Absolute Zero (0K) as the default no-magnitude state, is to posit that we all live in a vaccuum. The default no-magnitude state is not absolute zero -- a condition that doesn't really exist. To base an appraisal of the 'magnitude' of an effect on a nonexistent default is to totally mess up the common understanding of the terms, and the destroy the point of even considering what is 'an order of magnitude larger' in its worldly effects. (Again, I stress to you, a world in which the effect 'absolute zero' is not possible.) Therefore, the only real-world meaning that the idea of 'orders of magnitude' can have with regard to a temperature rating is in relation to an arbitrary baseline chosen for convenience. Zero degrees Celsius is a pretty good choice, as it's a temperature low enough that a computer will probably never see it, and that is sufficient, because all magnitudes below this level are completely irrelevant. But as the freezing point of water has no specifically relevant relationship to the performance of nanotechnology, room temperature is a far better choice, representing the 'default heat radiation' in the environment throughout which computers are deployed. So a computer that can run at 320C is an order of magnitude better than one that can only run at 50C (30C above room) -- this should be considered accurate. And since this is the ONLY definition of orders of magnitude that makes ANY real world sense in relation to computer temperature performance, to define magnitude in relation to anything else is just an example of the over-exercise of pedantry rendering a term impossible to use meaningfully -- so a computer that can run at the boiling point of water is only about 37% better in its tolerances than a computer that can't even run above the freezing point? Reductio ad absurdum. QED.
Let's face it, all Neal Stephenson books are vehicles for a certain type of cool technology, and not bad for it. However, he only seems to have worked out how to end a book well once - Snow Crash. Many authors struggle with endings, and Neal seems to struggle more than most. I say this with huge respect as a fan.
The problem with the Diamond Age is that, for me, it had nothing beyond the projection of what might happen if a cool tech existed - Snow Crash had a great story and fast-paced writing on top of it, and essentially [spoiler] has the same "secret" as Snow Crash - virusy thing causes humans to be susceptible to programming/group mind phenomena. This recycling of ideas is pretty weak and obviously invites direct comparison between the books, which Snow Crash wins - hell, just this introspection is better than any five chapters from Diamond Age:-
"Until a man is twenty-five, he still thinks, every so often, that under the right circumstances he could be the baddest motherfucker in the world. If I moved to a martial-arts monastery in China and studied real hard for ten years. If my family was wiped out by Colombian drug dealers and I swore myself to revenge. If I got a fatal disease, had one year to live, and devoted it to wiping out street crime. If I just dropped out and devoted my life to being bad. Hiro used to feel this way, too, but then he ran into Raven. In a way, this was liberating. He no longer has to worry about being the baddest motherfucker in the world. The position is taken."
Oops, I meant to say "Snow Crash had a great story and fast-paced writing on top of it, and essentially [spoiler] has the same "secret" as Diamond Age"
There is a function that I use a lot in my work, namely, the Fast Fourier Transform. Back before digital computers, someone came up with a method for computing the Fourier Series for a set number of harmonics (frequency and amplitude of the waveform were normalized). One cycle of the waveform was drawn at a given scale, and a stylus was used to trace the waveform. While the stylus moved, various gears in the machine turned at various rates, giving the harmonic content in the waveform by how much each gear moved. Very ingenious for the day.
It is quite possible that something like this could be implemented in nanotechnology, and would be able to generate spectral content pretty rapidly. I'd be interested in seeing how specialized mechanical processors of the past might be reimplemented in micro for current computing problems.
Here's a related idea, needing implementation/testing.
Just don't subject to severe shock.
As for your last comment, it's rubbish. Have you ever seen a teleprinter? A piezo inkjet printer? a hard disk drive?
Obviously you aren't an ancient hacker, or you would know a bit more about electromechanical technology.
Pining for the fjords