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Rod Logic Computers and Why We Don't Already Have Them (hackaday.com)
szczys writes: Carbon Nanotubes and Graphene breakthroughs pop up in the news often enough for them to be considered buzzwords. Most of the time it's the superconducting properties of graphene that are touted, but molecule-scale structures also hold the promise of building mechanical computing devices that are unimaginably small. The reason we don't have these things yet comes down to the manufacturing process. Building machines out of carbon molecules is commonly called Rod Logic — a topic many know from the seminal novel The Diamond Age. Al Williams discusses how Rod Logic works and highlights some of the places we're already seeing these materials like to help cool LED light bulbs, and to strengthen composites.
No doubt we'll get around to nanoscale rod logic just as soon as we've figured out how to genetically-engineer the mechanisms needed to assemble them. ;)
What was the point of the article? To tell us that we don't have nanometre scale devices... because we can't manufacture nanometre scale devices yet?
carbon-carbon-reinforced carbon. Then I can from that make, yup!, carbon-carbon-carbon-reinforced carbon. Eventually, I will become GOD! Or better, the FIRST BLACK GOD!
"The reason we don't have these things yet comes down to the manufacturing process"
Gee, that's very interesting. How about giving a summary of it in your post?
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Ok, as a thought experiment "Rod Logic" is neat. As a practical application? We're just going to keep pushing electrons through semi conductors until such time as we can figure out how to do the same thing with photons in, whatever decade that happens. Non solid state computational logic isn't a great idea for a lot of reasons. And while graphene is probably the near(ish) future it's for a reason that the author (and a large portion of the traditional semi conductor industry) miss.
Graphene is awesome, because it doesn't leak heat and has an electron mobility far higher than silicon. These two combine to bring back something from a decade or more ago, and that's clock speed. It's been "stuck" on the sweet spot of 1-2ghz for years and years and year now as that's where silicon operates best. But graphene, which uninformed articles not withstanding can be made into a semiconductor in quite a few ways, can clock far, far, far higher. Easily over a hundred times higher than silicon in theory.
How to get it to grow, and arrange itself into traditional nanometer scale wiring with high precision, and do so as a semiconductor, at industrial scales is certainly an open question. But one many, many researchers and companies that don't want to rely on silicon lithography forever seem fairly certain is a question that can be answered. And once it is all this nonsense about Moore's law being the only way to make computers better need not be continued. Who cares about molecule scale transistors if your CPU is clocked at 200+ ghz (or even terahertz, which is theoretically possible...) We don't need ever smaller, and exponentially harder to make transistors. We just need to get back to making them faster. And either graphene, or black phosphorous (a 2d phosphorous allotrope) or something else will certainly get us there.
I'm also kind of curious how a mechanical logic process, strengthens composites ?
If I could make a mechanical calculator at that scale, then I could just as easily make an electronic one, at that scale. The problem is the "manufacturing issues" they talk about are the same challenges that thwart building microelectronics on the same scale. Solve one, you solve the other, and electrons are a LOT smaller than rods, there's very little chance rods will outperform electronic or electro-optical gates of similar scale.
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mag amps....rod positioning memory post-scram....it was there!
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Because your mom already has a monopoly on rod logic.
Hey guys, you're being trolled.
A sage old electrical engineer about laughed me out of the room back '97 when I told him I seriously thought MEMS would be the next big thing. You know what? I think he is still laughing.
Unfortunately you're wrong on both counts.
You don't seem to understand how semiconductor electronics works, the size of its operating regions (hint: it's not related to the size of an electron at all), and the size limits below which doped semiconductors and junction technology cease to work even in theory.
No doubt some kind of electronic logic will be created to work at the atomic scale one day, but it won't have anything significant in common with today's bulk semiconductor technology. We would need something new, whereas with rod logic we've already had a well studied candidate mechanism for some decades.
In this case, a big, bold FUCK YOU! suffices
Graphene is not superconducting on its own and ballistic transport is not 'basically room temperature superconductivity'. These are important points.
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In (nano) Rod We Trust!
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