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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.'"
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
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.
Dude, this kind of speculative crap is published every 6 months. Going from theory to practice is the science and until they do any they're just masturbating in public.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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
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!
I'm not a nano-technologist, but I'd doubt that macroscopic ideas of friction and wear would apply to nano-machines.
Slashdot - where whining about luck is the new way to make the world you want.
welcome our Nanomechanical overlords...
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.
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.
Perhaps he's waiting for the $10,000, or perhaps he knows that theory is the important thing, and if it's viable, there will be many organisations vying for better and better implementations.
I for one don't consider science to be something that only people with money do. One has to wonder how many da Vinci's there would have been, if other people all had the resources he had. The renaissance itself shows that progress pops up everywhere, given resources. Doesn't mean the science wasn't there in the back of people's minds, waiting for them to get past the point of scraping together money for a loaf of bread, though.
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?
Oh, and your premise is wrong: building a MEMS chip of a non-trivial size pretty quickly runs in the hundreds of thousands of $, even with educational discounts. So pretty much you have to get the design ready, then ask for funding to build the thing, which is what they are presumably doing.
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".