Nano-switches and Self-Assembling Nanostructures

emc3 writes "Those wacky scientists are getting small again. Some folks at Yale have come up with a reversible molecular switch. And at Princeton, they've discovered a method of getting a sheet of resin to assemble ordered arrays of nano-pillars. They say that this process could lead to a new generation of flat-panel displays or DRAM. " Nanites. It's what's for dinner.

Comments

Dinner?

[PantherX]

Yum! Not very filling though...

Nanites, et al

[entropylurker]

Let's get small. (homage to Steve Martin) -

But ...

[Troed]

... shrinking everything down to molecular/atomic/quark level will indeed bring new challenges for us software engineers!

Just think about it:

• A bit that previously was next to another bit will remember the value of that bit even long after they were separated
  
• Quantum fluctuations brings a whole new level of randomness for Quake 4 levels
  
• A virus will now finally be a _virus_
  
• Upgrading a computer is now done by feeding it junk food - rich in minerals
  
• Since top quarks are much heavier than other quarks some applications will require careful programming (like, don't used bit 6 in a byte)
  

... not to mention the problem with attaching a fan to your overclocked AMD Genethlon - anyone seen a 5000 rpm fan 10 nanometers in diameter? :)

FUD what you don't understand.

[xant]

Nanotechnology is just the science of making very small things. Do you know how many very small things are in that CPU you take for granted? These are just a little smaller.

Do you really think that just because they're going to be very small, they're dangerous? The "ramifications" are that electrical engineering can be done cheaper and smaller.

Re:FUD what you don't understand.

[dman123]

No, I do not think small things are automatically dangerous. But the following from the article is what worries me.

In addition to shrinking the size of the switch to atomic dimensions, the researchers also used a fabrication method called "self assembly," where the device actually self-forms, in comparison to conventional methods of transistor fabrication using lithography.

I am not an EE (I'm a ChemE), so I don't know exactly what goes into the "self assembly" process. I assume it a lot more complicated than simple crystallization that I have to worry about at work. I mean, the assembly has to be done with a certain precision and intelligence, right? Some sort of formation instruction needs to be added to the initial 'starter molecule.' If not, would it be possible to control how this molecule forms itself?

Hey, if I'm way off base on how these little guys are formed, then I would feel better knowing that. I won't hesitate to admit my limit of knowledge in this area. I just don't think that everyone who works in this area of research knows 100% exactly what they are doing either. If they did, it wouldn't really be research.

--

Re:FUD what you don't understand.

[S_hane]

Nanotechnology is a subject that has had a lot of FUD and a lot of misconceptions floating around.

Everything I'm going to say here I got from Eric K. Drexler's "Engines of Creation" (A very good book IMHO), and my undergraduate biochemistry degree. Nothing is particularly inaccessible to "the general public", in fact Engines of Creation is VERY readable indeed. Yet the majority of people that say things about nanotechnology seem not to have even read this book (and EKD is _THE_ guy who thought up the whole nanotech field!!!)

OK. Enough bull$hit, etc.

Self-Assembly is almost _exactly_ like crystallisation. Essentially, you have a number of components that are complicated enough to only fit together in one configuration - and set things up so that the crystallised configuration has better energy characteristics than the uncrystallised configuration. I suppose one difference is that you don't end up with a single crystal with conceptually infinite dimensions, but instead with a number of discrete entities.

Some simple (and _NATURAL_) examples of self-assembly:

(1) Bilipid layers will spontaneously self-assemble from phospholipids. The reason is this: Phospholipids have a highly hydrophilic (water-attracted) "heads" at one end, and a highly hydrophobic (water-repellant) "tail" at the other (this is actually a fatty acid tail). When a sufficient concentration of these phospholipids are brought together, they tend to clump with the tails pointing inwards and the heads pointing outwards, towards the water. In this manner, they form little spheres. Occasionally, they will also clump in a double layer, with one layer consisting of phospholipids oriented with the heads pointing outwards, and the other layer oriented with the heads pointing INWARDS - you then get a flat sheet which often folds into a hollow sphere, that contains water in the middle.

This process can be made to occur quite easily - yet each and every one of our cells contains a phospholipid bilayer that keeps it as a discrete entity!

(2) Macrophages. These are viruses that prey on bacteria (I suppose as such we should be happy about them!). They are also very cool - after infecting a bacteria, they get it to produce a whole bunch of protein components (as well as a nucleic acid strand). These components SPONTANEOUSLY self-assemble into new macrophages - and these macrophages have quite a complicated structure (they look like eye-droppers with legs).

In both cases, there is absolutely no intelligence and/or control in the actual assembly process. The components naturally assemble by virtue of their shape.

I'm assuming that it's a similar process that is occuring in the case of the switch - each component is fabricated so as to assemble in a particular way. When they are mixed together, they just - assemble!

Another thing that a lot of people seem to be talking about / worried about is the concept of grey goo. I'm not sure whether this concept was invented by EKD or not, but he certainly talks about it.

The concept arose in the context of Von-Neumann machines (sorry if I spelt it wrongly!). These conceptual machines were designed to repclicate themselves. Possible applications of such machines would be as miners on remote planets -send out a Von-Neumann machine, which finds a particular quantity of Iron, replicates itself twice, then comes back to Earth. Each child machine does the same thing, ad infinatum....

The problem here is that such machines could replicate incorrectly (hey, it happens on Earth - we're Von-Neumann machines, and mutations occur quite frequently....it's part of a process called Evolution). Say a Von-Neumann machine was created that "forgot" that Earth was the mother planet, and began finding Iron and replicating ON EARTH....These machines would have been designed to find Iron anywhere they could....I'm sure you begin to see the possible problems here.

Nanomachines could potentially be made as Von-Neumann machines. I won't go into the whole purpose-of-nanomachines-as-Von-Neumann-machines thing, because EKD covers this _VERY_ well.

Grey goo is what happens when self-replicating nanomachines go "out of control", and chew up every available food source (like we're doing on Earth at the moment). Remember that, just as animals on Earth have evolved to get the most of just about any Carbon source, so too (potentially) could sufficiently complicated Von-Neumann machines. We (among other things) are Carbon sources.

So, yes, Grey goo is a BIG potential problem that needs to be addressed very carefully before we start to make self-replicating nanomachines.

Self-assembly, though, is an entirely different thing, one with a lot less inherent danger mainly because machines assemble out of materials that WE provide, and then can not replicate themselves.

I also don't want to sound too much like a scare-mongerer. Nanotechnology in a sufficiently advanced form could provide many benefits to humans - from feeding the world's masses, to space travel, to rapid assembly of products, to extension of life span (possibly indefinitely). Again, these topics are very well covered in EKD's book so I won't go into them too much.

-Shane Stephens

Gray Goo

[retep]

Today we may have harmless, no, make that highly benificial, self-construction pillars. But in a few hundred years or so we may have not so harmless gray goo that can reproduce it'self in most substances. Such a substance could have the potential to turn our world into a big mass of gray goo.

We must make sure we stop before our nanomachines can reproduce themselves in anything but highly exotic enviornments.

Re:Death of the "standard" microprocessor?

[AngryMob]

My guess would be that you don't try to defeat the size requirement.. you just use different computational methods. The human brain works quite well, and that's just a big parallel/threshold logic gate setup. Computationally the brain does things that would bog down the best of machines today (like visual processing) just using massive parallelism. I'd guess processors, once they hit the ultimate limit, will basically have to change to more parallel models (this doesn't mean Beowulf) in order to perform faster computation.

You have to wonder how suitable current circuit design (i mean in terms of the basic building blocks, i.e., binary logic gates and binary states) is for pushing speed barriers - I mean you lend yourself to easy duplication and brute-force speed, but I don't think it's the best schema in terms of fast computing - as maybe evidenced by the necessity for hardware specialization. But who knows, not like I know what i'm talking about.

SA

Nano-logic synthesis

[mOdQuArK!]

Ye Gods (& Goddesses :) - imagine what the synthesis system is going to look like to be able to create a circuit using nano-sized logic gates.

I don't think today's tools are up to it - at the very least, for modeling purposes, there will have to be a quantum-model-simulator like [H]SPICE (QSPICE anyone? :).

Place & route will be on a massive scale for random logic. Not only will the interconnect dwarf the effects of the nano-gates, but you'll have to model effects like quantum-tunneling & other bizarre features.

Tools will have to automatically provide circuitry with fault tolerance, since a cosmic ray blasting through a molecule-sized switch is going to be a catastrophic event...

I suspect that for large arrays of nano-components, there will be a lot of borrowing from the computations that crystallographers do, since they are used to deriving the gross characteristics of substances by mathematically extending "unit cells" ad infinitum.

A lot of the work of the tools will be to just figure out the "self-assembly" steps - do this to make THIS layer self-assemble, then do this to make THAT layer self-assemble, etc., w/o them interfering with each other.

If all the self-assembly steps are low-power, I wonder if it will be possible to finally make these logic circuits in a cube form? (Building up the cube layer-by-layer, instead of starting w/raw silicon wafer & eating layers away like we currently do).

There are so many things that become possible when this technology reaches some threshholds, that I suspect a lot of people "overload" and start tuning out the potential issues because their brains don't want to deal w/all the possible changes which might occur :)

Re:Nano-logic synthesis

[chadmulligan]

They will probably use a combination of two techniques, namely, using a standard logic block ringed with interconnect patterns, and evolution.

The self-assembly process isn't understood yet, from what I gather from the article, and it may not be possible to adapt it to patterns more complicated than an array of round pillars - but if it is, you'll get something like a huge matrix of standard blocks. If you figure out the interconnects correctly so they'll self-align, you'll get something which can be programmed by an extension of today's FPGA techniques... either permanently with a laser probe or by injecting serial data streams into the array.

There have been some interesting papers published (sorry, can't find the URL now) about evolutionary programming of FPGA's... that may also be applicable.

Finally, they recently figured out how to make vertical transistors (unlike the horizontal ones used today) which can be stacked in 3 dimensions. So I think we'll see logic and memory chips using these principles in a relatively short time - 5 or 10 years is my guess.

Re:Nano-logic synthesis

[mOdQuArK!]

Finally, they recently figured out how to make vertical transistors (unlike the horizontal ones used today) which can be stacked in 3 dimensions. So I think we'll see logic and memory chips using these principles in a relatively short time - 5 or 10 years is my guess.

Cool - do you have a reference with a general description of the technique they used to make these vertical transistors?

Re:Nanotech is the key to a living hell

[Sir Timothy]

If all unpleasant memories are removed from my mind, I will keep making the mistakes that led to those unpleasant memories over and over. If I live forever, my life will become meaningless..how can one appreciate the wonders and miracles of life if they're all handed out on a silver platter..without having to work for them.

Sure, one could say, I've earned the money to have nanobots put into my body, and it's my right to do so. I'm not going to argue that. But I don't think immortality should be for sale at any cost..I believe it upsets the balance of life and death, of renewal and decay..I don't want to live forever, anyway.."Death is not an end, but only a transition.." The body sleeps, the soul lives on.

peace,

Nano stuff

[GodOfHellfire]

ok, maybe its just me, but articles like this are so annoying. they don't really _say_ anything about the technology. yes, yes, i know about grants, and secrecy, etc etc, but they could at least tell us the composition, structure, or theory behind the 'switch'. for all we know, this was a cute theoretical thing they discovered in the lab that will only work when X, Y, and Z are present, and Jupiter is in line with Mars. it may have absolutely no practical application.

Re:DRAM? Oh oh.

[Industrial Disease]

Yeesh, this is almost as bad as the time everybody wigged out over the story about using bacterial proteins in thin displays. "Oh no! I'm gonna catch a disease from my laptop!" As far as I can tell, these guys are talking about using nanotech principles in the manufacturing pricess, not putting active nanomachines in the finished process.
As much as I like Star Trek for stirring people to take an interest in the sciences, I could cry when they start taking Trek's rubber physics too seriously.

The new Nano-Picutre

[Haven]

instead of grouping NanoTech w/ science we should make its own group. I have also made a picture for the headline on slashdot. Its in between the quotes:

" . "

Re:Self assembling nanostructures

[doom]

Just once, I would like to read a discussion about nanotech on Slashdot without someone bringing Neal Stephenson into it.

Try reading Engines of Creation by Eric Drexler. Then you'll know where Neal Stephenson got his material.

Or take a look at the website for Zyvex, "the first molecular nanotechnology development company".

Re:Nanotech is the key to a living hell

[mOdQuArK!]

Concerning how long you want to live, go ahead and live 500, 1,000, 5,000 years..you'll literally have to live with it..I just know I won't and don't want to be around to see it.I don't see what the problem is - you live until you don't want to, then you shut down the nanotech & start dying. You get a choice - unlike today.Just ponder the implications of being able to directly modify/"implant" memories..it's bad enough when propoganda and rewriting history causes events to be "forgotten", imagine actually forgetting the event, did it even happen, then?Potentially quite a big issue. If someone WAS going around using nanotech to modify/erase people's memories, would it be possible to create nanotech to protect yourself from such a malicious act? ("backup & restore your brain!")And as for death..I don't see a natural death as horrible (of course, what constitutes a "natural" death is a debate considerably out of the scope of this thread)..I think it'd be more horrible to watch your friends and lovers age and die while you stay perfectly healthy..and how long could a body last until it became totally dependent on nanotech for survival, to the point where death would be instant should the nanobots be partially or totally removed?I don't see "personal" nano technology evolving this way, it sounds too much like one of those corny occult movies where the villian is sustaining himself beyond "natural" means by existing on the life force of other creatures, and dies instantaneously when he can't get his fix.First, if nanotech is widely available, then your friends/lovers/family/etc will have just as much chance to live long as you do.Second, if nanotech is just being used to continually maintain & repair an existing body, then it won't kill you if they were removed (given that the removal process doesn't kill you) - your body would just keep doing what it was doing BEFORE it had the nanotech. If the nanotech has combined with your body to the point where your body no longer does the things it did before - well, then the nanotech has become part of your body, and removing it is just the same is murdering you. I don't see any real ethical difference between murdering you with or w/o nanotech.

Re:An Explanation for Homeopathy?

[doom]

I think the most likely explanation for Homeopathy is that it really is hokum, and just doesn't work. See: Homeopathy: The Ultimate Fake. My fave quote:

Since many homeopathic remedies contain no detectable amount of active ingredient, it is impossible to test whether they contain what their label says.

I guess you're suggesting that the reason that an absurdly low concentration of a substance can supposedly have some sort of medical effect is that the molecules of the substance are breeding more of themselves through some sort of "self-assembly" process. Don't you think that a chemist would notice if this was going on? "Huh, I mixed in a small amount of X into Y, but now the concentration of X has gone up." This kind of thing is pretty easy to measure these days.

Re:Mortality [was: '... a living hell']

[Lord Kano]

>>Why are we so afraid of death?

After seeing death, I know that I don't want it to happen to me.

I don't want my body to lie in wormy earth and decompose. I know that I can't stop it from happening, but at the same time I don't WANT it to happen. I don't see a problem with that.

>>I think the idea that the soul goes on is detrimental because it encourages people to dismiss reality in favor of an imagined reward that is cut off from our lives by the sharp division of death.

I find that my beliefe in an afterlife is more dependant upon the need for punishment than the need for a reward. I'll explain, I don't find it acceptable to think that someone like Adolph Hitler will not face some manner of punishment in the next life while someone like Mother Teresa (No I'm not Catholic) will not be rewarded.

>>On the other hand, maybe people would relax a bit more if our lifespans were extended to, say, 200 healthy years. Maybe things would slow down and people would think about the consequences of their actions more, and feel less pressure.

This is not my point, when it's possible if I'm still alive and can afford to do so I'd jump at the chance.

LK

Re:Nanotech is the key to immortality.

[Lord Kano]

>> if something bad were to happen to you, you'd simply forget it

As I said before, I'm talking about truly traumatic experiences. A women can forget enough of the gruesome details of a rape to be able to enjoy making love again. Someone could forget the images of watching his friend or family member decapitated in a car accident so that s/he can live an otherwise normal life.

>>When does all this get boring? What becomes of all the challenges?

We then find OTHER challenges. Even though we can all obtain knowledge that we as a species have, there is always something more to learn. We must find THAT knowledge. There will always be more to learn and explore. This would free us to do so.

Need a liver transplant? No problem, go to sleep and have your rebuilt. Congenital heart defect? No problem when you're baby is a week old it will be repaired.

>>Take Bill Gates, for instance; he could just sit there in his mountains of money and despair, because now he can have anything he wants without having to work for it.

He has already "worked" for it. He was smart, he was ruthless, he was greedy and he was lucky. As much as I despise him, he has earned the money he should be able to get anything he can afford.

>>You may have your Brave New World but I shall pass. Lobotomy has more than one form.

You apparantly never read Brave New World. What I am talking about is the possibility for true equality for all people.

This is the next step in our evolution. We've reached the point where we no longer need to adapt to the environment to survive. We just hit an evolutionary brick wall, this is the way to break through it. I just hope that I live long enough to see it.

LK