Building computer circuits at the atomic scale
Silicon–based semiconductors won’t be small enough or fast enough for the computer of the future.
Don Eigler of IBM and his colleagues are looking ahead to a time when silicon–based semiconductors hit a barrier – perhaps in the next 10 to 15 years – in terms of their usefulness in making computers that are ever–smaller, yet ever more powerful.
They’re testing a new technology at the Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. It relies on nanotechnology, the ability to manipulate materials on the scale of atoms and molecules. Eigler and his colleagues engineered chains of carbon monoxide molecules on a surface of copper. They then moved just one molecule, which triggered a chain reaction. The molecules toppled like dominos, he said, in order to transmit information.
Don Eigler: So it’s kind of reminiscent of standing up a linear chain of dominos and knocking one over, causing the next one to topple, and the next one to topple, and the next one to topple.
These “molecular dominos” can now be used to perform simple computations. They operate at a scale hundreds of thousands of times smaller than the logic elements of today’s computer chip. Although the commercial applications of this technology are still years away, Eigler sounded excited. He said researchers are now in an “age of exploration” related to computing at the scale of individual atoms.
Our thanks today to the National Science Foundation.
Eilger explained the current research challenge of this new computing technology. Like dominos, he said, the molecules could only do their trick of toppling to transmit information only once.
“So our challenge was to think of a way to reset our dominos,” he said, “and the thing that looks very promising is to use the magnetic property of electrons, what physicists call the ‘spin’ of the electrons.”
Our thanks to:
Donald Eigler
IBM Fellow
IBM Almaden Research Center
San Jose, CA
