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.

Comments

Re:"Dude look this is so cool!" and useless

[radarskiy]

"Who cares about molecule scale transistors if your CPU is clocked at 200+ ghz"

The guy stuck trying to converge a path with 5 cycles of clock skew cares a heck of a lot.

Re:"Dude look this is so cool!" and useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Silicon can reach clock speeds to 100 GHz without an issue, the problem is related to getting 100 GHz on chip scale. At such high speeds the speed of light plays a large role and you simply can't shuffle data around the die fast enough.

Also graphene cannot be made into a semiconductor without severely affect its mobility. You can have one or the other, but not both yet.