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Science

Berkeley Lab Fashions First Buckyball Transistor 114

Atomasoft Corporation writes: "The article here says: 'The first transistors to be fashioned from a single "buckyball" -- a molecule of carbon-60 -- have been reported by scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and the University of California at Berkeley.' It won't take so much time and we will able to buy our Nanocomputers! What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?" As interesting as the buckyball/gold combination is the machine used to make them: "The gold electrodes used in this study were fabricated on Berkeley Lab's 'Nanowriter,' an ultra-high resolution lithography machine that can generate an electron beam at energies up to 100,000 volts with a diameter of only five nanometers."
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Berkeley Lab Fashions First Buckyball Transistor

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  • So much for IBM [ibm.com]'s little hard disk...

    I wonder if they'll make and upgrade for my old USRobotics Pilot 5000 haldheld?

  • by Kriticism ( 225999 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:18PM (#694471)
    What sort of use would this technology be in implants? Something that small should have no problem operating off the level juice flowing through the nervous system. Hey....maybe you could repair nervous damage. Sheath a nerve fiber in circuitry. Hmmm....
  • This could be great for storage for the average cosnumer. But we have to remember hard drives have to be built to endure wear and tear. Average harddrives will be used for years on end, something so small sounds like it could be open to a lot of environmental factors in the computer, like scratches, heat, etc. So if there's one tiny defect it could ruin (gigabytes, terabytes, whatever) a majority of the storage cube. Are we willing to risk this much to have a god-like storage system?
  • by Koh-I-Noor ( 206758 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:19PM (#694473) Homepage

    A bucky ball is a molecule of C60.

    Basically it is 60 Carbon atoms together in a molecule that is shaped like a soccer ball

  • Think about the energy saving on something like this! Having components made at the molecular level will dramatically change computing power! The PC I have now will seem like computers in the 1940's in both size and processing power.


    All I can say is 'cool'!

    Capt. Ron

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:20PM (#694475)
    The buckeyball computer works like this. The computation is carried out by shaking the ball. The result is read by opening the lid, just like a magic 8-ball.
  • "Are we willing to risk this much to have a god-like storage system?"

    YES!!!

    I am willing to shock mount my computer, encase it in acrylic, and use liquid nitrogen to balance heat if it meant that I could have THAT kind of storage. I'd really hate to see the fsck time if the computer lost power without a clean mount though...
  • Imagine using one of these while you're sick.

    *ACHOO*

    Just TRY and find your computer now.

    Or . . .

    Imagine taking a project-based class in learning how to build these things (a degree in nanotechnology).

    Professor: "You didn't turn in your project."

    You: "Yes, I did. I put it in that microscope slide on your desk so you wouldn't lose it."

    Professor: "You mean the one I'm using to examine my e-coli culture?"
  • 'Buckyballs' are molecules of buckminsterfullerene, the third allotrope of carbon (graphite and diamond being the first two). It consists of 60 carbon atoms in a geodesic dome arrangement.

    This link [inetarena.com] has an article all about the discovery and naming of buckminsterfullerene.
  • by Docrates ( 148350 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:25PM (#694479) Homepage
    What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?

    well that's easy, microsoft windows 2010 (released on 2011) would fill a few pounds worth of sugar...

    on a more serious note, i wonder if the rate at which humanity generates information (regardless of it relevance) will grow exponantially at the same rate as the media we use to hold it. so far it seems they've been pretty much the same for a while, i've always felt the same way about a HD, it seems huge when you buy it, but you always fill it out...

    i guess eventually storage media's capacity will grow that much faster, when will that be? opinions?
  • Although buckyball transistors would indeed be useful for storage it wouldn't be in the form of a harddrive like we know them. Hard drivers are mechanical things that store stuff magenetically. these would work alot like RAM.
  • by the_other_one ( 178565 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:28PM (#694481) Homepage

    Q: What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010?

    A: You would have to get a second cube to install Windows 2010.

  • by pigpen_ ( 56028 ) <leklund@tastytronic.net> on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:29PM (#694482) Homepage
    dude, if you would have actually read the article you would have noticed the link to this article [nytimes.com] in the NYTimes which gives a brief history of buckyballs.
    --
    lukas
  • It seems like everything that has incredible implications in the world of technology is fashioned from carbon. Lightweight Carbon composite fabrics for use in a solar sail, Carbon nano-tubules for strands of semi-conducting material, etc. Is Carbon going to be the nano-medium of the nanoscopic age?
  • But we have to remember hard drives have to be built to endure wear and tear. Average harddrives will be used for years on end, something so small sounds like it could be open to a lot of environmental factors in the computer, like scratches, heat, etc. So if there's one tiny defect it could ruin (gigabytes, terabytes, whatever) a majority of the storage cube. Are we willing to risk this much to have a god-like storage system?

    I assume that we are talking about the construct made of Buckyballs and gold about the size of a sugar cube? The weak link would be the possibilities of the gold bending and/or twisting out of alignment. Given how cheap titanium might be by the time it could be constructed, why not just sheathe the whole thing in a shock absorbing insulator and add a layer of titanium on the outside.

    I am in no way involved directly, but I have talked with people who do tests on drive stress, including the IBM microdrive, and they can be made pretty impact resistant. (More so if the drive isn't spinning than if it is.) Those technologies should not be too dificult to translate to a device with FAR fewer moving parts and a much higher density.

    B. Elgin

  • by Anonymous Coward
    I remember an old movie in which the good guys break an abacus on the floor to make the bad guys slip and fall. Now in the remake, the good guys will break a pentium IVII chip on the floor and let the little buckyballs do the job.
  • by Decado ( 207907 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:37PM (#694486)

    Of course by then whatever desk space you save with a tiny computer will be taken up by your 80 inch monitor. And you can perish the thought of sitting your monitor on top of one of those :)

    That also raises another issue, I find it hard not to lose things like pens and cds off of my desk, when my pc is the size of a eunuchs prick i'll certainly waste a lot of money having to replace em :(

  • by sulli ( 195030 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:37PM (#694487) Journal
    C60 was named buckminsterfullerene after Buckminster Fuller [bfi.org], the inventor of the geodesic dome among many other things.

    Fans of Bucky who happen to be in the SF Bay Area should check out R. Buckminster Fuller: The History (And Mystery) of the Universe, a one-man play about his life, based on his writings, designs, and photos. It's fascinating. Info is at Foghouse, [foghouse.com] the theater company that's producing the show.

  • by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:38PM (#694488)
    if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube, in 2010

    uhm, be careful to label the right sugar cube. you don't want some hippie swallowing the whole internet now, do you?

    --

  • by photozz ( 168291 ) <photozz AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:40PM (#694489) Homepage
    Didn't I read somewhere that buckyballs, being almost perfectly round, would make a perfect molecular lubricant? Imagine micro motors that could run infinitely fast without burning out.

  • by fringd ( 120235 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:41PM (#694490) Homepage
    buckminster fuller is a real world mad scientist. everybody thought he was off his rocker. he cast away the entire euclidian gemoetry in favor of a triangle based way of thinking. he built a car with three weels, circular air-deliverable houses. and fasioned the geodesic dome. after he died, it was discovered C60 naturally occurs in the shape of a geodesic dome. it just shows how damn cool he is. read more about this legend [bfi.org].
  • Yah, but the FUNCTION would be the same. Store data. access times would not be a concern any more..........

  • Just curious, but what the hell kinda number is IVII? hmmmm.... On second thought, knowing intel's past with their buggy fpu's, it is guite possible they'd release a chip with this Roman numeral.
  • No thanks, I'd prefer a computer that doesn't _need_ a journaling filesystem...
  • Imagine an engine that stored data in its cooling system.
  • Think about it - a network of Buckyball Transitor based Plastic computers that you could wear as a patterned jacket in a beowulf cluster!

    Man, all you'd have to do to increase your computational resources would be to hang your jacket up in the closet!

  • Actually, we will have mini projectors that project onto the wall. Of course, the mouse and keyboard will look lonely sitting on the desk all by themselves. Unless, everything is voice controlled.
  • 'cause he was building a search and destroy nanobot to target e. coli bacteria!
  • This is a great news and all, but it'll be a LONG time before anything is produced commerically from it. It would take considerable engineering efforts to implement a new process in manufacturing of any type of IC. Just look how slow copper is making the progression. Only bleeding edge technologies can benefit from it because the process of building an IC from copper is entirely different from alumnimun. Now, in that example just the materials are different... imagine if the entire method to produce transistors is different....

    ---
  • Hmm, let's see now:

    Now we have the nano-sized transitor (MOS-FET, actually), the carbon nano-tubes (which have a variety of uses, from springs to struts, etc...) and the carbon nano-bucky ball. We have tiny electrostatic motors, tiny gears, and many other things that are shrinking in size.

    Is there any group hell-bent on putting all of this nano-stuff together and making something?

    I just get the sensation that we are approaching the point where we should have enough misc. nano-sized parts to actually make something VERY cool... mechanical style.

    Ok, I'm really sick of typing 'nano' now. =)

  • Is Carbon going to be the nano-medium of the nanoscopic age?

    Carbon is, basically, a pretty funky element.

    Buckyballs and nano-tubes show great promise for nanotechnology.

    The ring around the Earth in 3001: Final Odessey by Arthur C. Clarke also springs to mind; made out of synthetically produced diamond, with tall towers connecting the Earth's surface to the ring in orbit. The surface area inside the ring was be enormous, and was home to millions (billions?) of people.

    Carbon's the medium of life (on this planet, anyway), a great candidate for nanotechnology structures, and if diamond can be synthetically manufactured on a massive scale, would be the material for macro-scale projects.
  • it seems pretty likely that we'll switch over to carbon. indeed i find it interesting. we've gone through the stone age, various metal ages, and now we're in the gold age. and soon, we'll be coming into a new and great diamond age of things made of carbon. and all along, we've been made of carbon. our natural evolution figured this out eons ago. our intellectual evolution is just catching up right now.
  • by gb ( 8474 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @12:52PM (#694502) Homepage
    Without having read the original nature paper (being at home and not in the lab) - I wonder what the operating temperature of this transistor is ? It sounds remarkably like a single electron type device, and generally they have to be operated at a few mK (like -273.14 Centigrade), so you get a very, very small computer with several hundred kg of fridge attached...
  • Warning: Pregnant women, the elderly and children under 10 should avoid prolonged exposure to Happy Buckyball.
    Caution: Happy Buckyball may suddenly accelerate to dangerous speeds.
    Happy Buckyball Contains a liquid core, which, if exposed due to rupture, should not be touched, inhaled, or looked at.
    Do not use Happy Buckyball on concrete.

    Geoff (credit to Saturday Night Live for Happy Fun Ball)
  • by Anonymous Coward
    We'll still have mice, or at least huge joysticks. Imagine playing a mindless game like UT or Q3A with voice controls. "Left! No, left! Right! Run backwards! Fire! AUGGH!"
  • With something that small and capacitant, we could easily have each buckyball mirrored 10fold....that way, if 1 failed 9 more have that information..and it could dynamically find free areas to continue with the mirroring. unless of course it is so fragile that normal use could cause a large percentage (>5%) of it to degrade per year
  • I can't wait to watch the upcoming Nanocup through an electron telescope.
  • by Anonymous Coward
    Mind expanding chemicals, Mind expanding os, Mind expanding astrophysics and now: Mind expanind electronics. Does that make it: Bezerkly: Who needs .tar to expand the universe?
  • Say for instance, you could store the entire 2000 Internet in a cube the size of a sugar cube. But the downside was that the storage medium was very sensitive to data loss. You could simply make the data very redundant. For instance, you could attempt to store data equal to 10% of the maximum storage capacity & mirror the data in several locations. You could then have your operating system scan the data & media for errors, flag the location as unusable, & rewrite the data from on of the mirrored locations.
  • by torpor ( 458 ) <ibisum.gmail@com> on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @01:03PM (#694509) Homepage Journal
    For that matter, with this sort of technology, using it for offline storage would be moot.

    Hard drives are a hack because RAM is so expensive and difficult to maintain without loss (i.e. turn it off, away it goes). With this sort of technology, presumably we'd have a whole new realm of design to consider, such that we don't *need* offline storage (which is what hard drives used to be called) for the CPU to save to in case of power outage.

    I look forward to the day when there's just memory, lots of it, it's very fast, and it doesn't require a lot of power to move parts around. *That* will be a computer worth obsessing about...
  • on a more serious note, i wonder if the rate at which humanity generates information (regardless of it relevance) will grow exponantially at the same rate as the media we use to hold it.

    I don't think that we're really generating any more information than in the past. I think that it has more to do with the format we use to store the information. I mean, a one paragraph document in an old word processor (like Works 1 or 2) compared to that exact same paragraph in Word 2000 is a few k smaller, at the very least.
    --
  • while all of this speculation about storage in sugar is nice it has very little to do with the atricle in question. The atricle is about TRANSISTORS, which are effectively switches in a micro-processor..

    the huge advantage that this discovery will bring is devices that because they operate using the the state of a single atom are soo small, and draw sooo little power that will wil be able to surpass everything currently being deigned by intel and amd

    Icars
  • I'm going to avoid pointing out the obvious. The cube would be packaged in such as way that you could not loose it. You need interface anways, you can't just will the information from the cube.
  • That also raises another issue, I find it hard not to lose things like pens and cds off of my desk, when my pc is the size of a eunuchs prick i'll certainly waste a lot of money having to replace em :(

    You forgot that in this happy, spiffy future of ours, the computer is too tiny to need a desk. Just wear it on your wrist and call it a watch. You can "plug in" wirelessly to the nearest monitor or simply the visor/whatever you carry around.

    B. Elgin

  • by Compuser ( 14899 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @01:19PM (#694514)
    Power savings are dubious at this point.
    To get reliable operation from single
    electron devices you need ambient energy
    (temperature) to be low enough to not
    distort signals too much. So most likely
    practical devices will need liquid helium
    scale temparatures. Researchers in this area
    routinely envision PCs with something like
    cryotech stuff only much fancier.
    Supercooling will consume a lot of power.
    So there may be a net gain in power consumption,
    but that is not obvious right now.
  • C60 means 60 atoms of carbon twelve covalently bonded. This means that the atoms share electrons with their neighbors as opposed to passing electrons around. Covelant bonds are an extremely stable type of chemical bond.

    I found this article to be somewhat dissapointing. I was hoping that the researchers had come up with a way to concretely take an atom and use it as a logic gate. Instead, they 'used a solution' of atoms in-between electrodes and noticed that the solution had the properties of a transistor. Then they got 'excellent' correllation that there were in fact buckyballs in there.

    Hopefully the day is not long off where one can take indidual molecules and string them together to perform complex boolean operations at the molecular level. When that happens, molecular computing will be a reality. But it ain't there yet. . . .

    -s

  • Wasn't the fist Happy Fun Ball pioneered at Berkeley as well?
  • With sizes that small, you would be able to build mayn many RAID equivelance systems for your data, in fact redundancy would become an integral part of the system.
  • I was reading an article about digital music in relation to this saying how at the current rate of storage capicity increases will allow us to store the enitre library of currently published CDs in mp3 format on what the typical hard drive you could get for $150 is in 12 years. In relation to your comment though, I believe that there will always be another step up in terms of storage space.

    In the digital music example, perhaps people will prefer to use actual WAV files instead of mp3s so they don't lose any of the musical data eliminated in mp3s, and past that, ripped verisions of DVD-Audio, or Super CDs. It seems that this analogy will hold true for a variety of digitial mediums. It's not necessarily the programs themselves that will increase in size at this rate, it's the data files. Given the choice of a larger data file that will give more detail for what is trying to be accomplished, people will choose the larger file if their it fits within their storage capicity and their processors will be able to process them, which of course they will since good old Moore's law applies to those as well.

    Maybe we will reach that maximum, but I don't think it will be for a while.

    -----------------------
  • If you generate information and have no
    storage for it then it is not information.
    In other words, you can't have more info than
    you can store.
  • while all of this speculation about storage in sugar is nice it has very little to do with the atricle in question. The atricle is about TRANSISTORS, which are effectively switches in a micro-processor..

    Um. What do you think your memory chips are built from?

  • by mOdQuArK! ( 87332 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @01:39PM (#694521)
    I figure that we'll come up with some new "journaling" file system that never overwrites ANY old information, and basically keeps ALL versions of any given file (and maybe redundant copies to boot). Why bother erasing anything if you'll never run out of any room?

    Then again, each person might end up with their own sugar cube storage & environment recording system which records their entire environment (at least audio/visual) from their own viewpoint 24/7 for their entire life. Encrypted, of course, and backed up wirelessly to a remote sugar cube, so that it won't be used against you.

    (Now that I think about it, people will probably figure out ways to use up just about any form of memory that anybody can come up with...)
  • Hey baby, guess how many gigs are in my pants.

    or

    I got the entire libary of congress in my jean pocket, want to see?

    I think the ONLY REAL use of cool techonlgy is to be used to come up with better pick up lines.


  • Hi there,

    If this beast "the Nanowriter" pumps out electron beams of only a 5 nanometre diameter, now we can get a truly infinite resolution monitor!

    It could happen.
  • I think we're going to keep filling up all the storage space we have. Your HD example is a good one. I swear to god, last year a 13G HD sounded reasonable for the house and now I'm kicking myself.

    And we haven't begun to store all the crap we're going to. Music has just started its digitization and pretty soon it'll be movies.

    The big push will be the stuff to archive. We're already feeding massive amounts of data into our machines (for past societies that couldn't) so our kids can read about Easter Island and such.

    Essentially I don't think we'll ever see the headline: Storage Research Halted. Scientists Declare "We Have More Than Enough Room Now"

  • *Me walks over to coffee, puts in surgar and looks at the email screen's error message*

    "Error, Internet is being digested"

    *Me looks at coffee*

    "Ah, Crap!"
  • Diamond is very hard, but I don't think it's particularly strong, is it? I mean, it's incredibly easy to shatter a diamond. A diamond tower would probably have great tensile strength, but crummy rigidity. If an airplane hit it, it would rain diamond shards. That would really suck for the people below. :)


    --

  • Between this and plastic electronics I can finally have my PC installed in my body. Install locating chips in my fingertips and I can control/type. Heads-up style monitoring through contact lenses would be cool. If my body cannot generate enough power I could replace a nad with an inertial generator ("but, honey, I need recharging.") This could lead to odd behavior in public. ("Is he dancing?" "No, it's a DoS attack.")
  • by Epi-man ( 59145 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @01:48PM (#694528) Journal
    I have to say, what is described in the article is a far cry from a transistor. All they have done to this point is fill disconnected gold contacts with conductive Carbon-60.

    From the article:

    "the authors stated in their Nature paper. "The transport measurements demonstrate that single-electron tunneling events can be used both to excite and probe the motion of a molecule.""

    Have these guys ever heard of a tunneling electron microscope? Have they not seen the "IBM" written using individual atoms? This doesn't sound too new to me yet. It is possible I am missing something since the article doesn't seem to be written for engineers. Of course, once I got to this part:

    "McEuen says this quantized nano-mechanical movement of the carbon-60 might serve as a logic gate, a means of storing information in the position of the molecule that would be more stable and much faster than the current technology."

    I realized they hadn't made a transistor yet. All they have done is connected two electrodes with carbon-60, and since they might be able to isolate carbon-60 between two electrodes, they might be able to make something useful with it. Heck, they only have two electrodes right now, and last I check, transistors were at least 3 terminal devices. I don't mean to belittle their work, it is definitely a good road to follow, but it is also definitely a long road still. Let's not all get too excited too early.
  • hmm, now lets see those nutcase^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hextreme overclockers get a hold of this.
    --
  • ...What would happen if we can store all the information of internet in a sugar cube...

    Dude 1 Have you seen a sugar cube around here?

    Dude 2 Yeah, on that plate. I put it in my coffee.

    Dude 1 Dude! That was the whole internet. It was our only copy!

    Dude 2 Oh well, S*&^ happens.

    Dude 1 What's it taste like?

    Dude 2 (sip...) sort of raunchy.

  • If life gives you lemons, make lemonade, but if life gives you nanometer sized fissures and buckeyballs, make transistors.

  • Diamonds apparently can shatter, although it would probably take something pretty big to do it. A jumbo jet would probably do quite nicely :-)
    I had a poke around on Google and this article [zyvex.com] on Zyvex's website (a molecular nanotech company) popped up, all about the use of synthetic diamond.

    Some interesting ideas about diamond's applications in molecular computer production.

    It also mentions that diamond fibres could perhaps be used instead to avoid the shatter problem.

    Ah well, Arthur C. Clarke can't be right about everything, can he? :-)
  • Was that an example of "Reply hazy, try again"?
  • Could the lithograph used to make the gold electrons be considered a type of... alchemy? (sp?)

    -------
    CAIMLAS

  • by NanoProf ( 245372 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @03:12PM (#694535)
    It turned out that the buckyball, although nicely round, is too sticky to work well as a lubricant on the macroscopic scale. They tend to collect adsorbates from the air, which then dirties their surfaces. But a collection of clean buckyballs, when carefully prepared, forms an ordered close-packed crystal in which, above about 260 Kelvins (room temperature is 300 K), the individual balls spin freely about their lattice positions. So they are very smooth, when clean. I did a bit of research on buckyballs (aka C60) in my grad student and postdoc days at Berkeley.
  • Of course by then whatever desk space you save with a tiny computer will be taken up by your 80 inch monitor. And you can perish the thought of sitting your monitor on top of one of those :)

    Not when we use those organic glasses with ultra-high-resolution video for each eye, for true stereoscopic terminals. :-)

  • by NanoProf ( 245372 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @03:25PM (#694537)

    The operating temperature of a single-electron transistor is set to a large extent by the capacitive charging of the dot where the electron resides. The first single electron transistors (SET) where fabricated with e.g. scanning electron microscope (SEM) e-beam writing technology, and the dots where consequently quite a bit larger than a single C60 molecule. A big dot has a large capacitance, therefore the charge of a single electron produces a very small voltage. Voltage, multiplied by the electron charge, yields an energy. Converting this energy to temperature, one obtains a very low temperature for an SEM-defined SET. However, the charging energy for a single electron on a buckyball is quite a bit higher. Therefore it is possible to envision devices that could operate at room temperature (e.g. the nanotube-based transistors work fine at room temperature). That said, Paul McEuen's experiment here is performed at 1.5 Kelvins (very cold) since they want to resolve very fine detail in the electron current/voltage characteristics that are associated with the vibrations of the buckyball. (I must admit- I only skimmed the article, so I might've missed something).

    I'm leaving out some details here- the spacing between quantum mechanical electron energy levels is also important (it becomes bigger as the electrons become more confined in smaller devices).

    Short answer- a sufficiently small single-electron device can operate at room temperature, if properly designed. The real trick (as mentioned in an earlier comment) is to integrate more than one device (say, oh a couple billion) into a useful device.

  • "McEuen says this quantized nano-mechanical movement of the carbon-60 might serve as a logic gate, a means of storing information in the position of the molecule that would be more stable and much faster than the current technology."

    I realized they hadn't made a transistor yet. All they have done is connected two electrodes with carbon-60, and since they might be able to isolate carbon-60 between two electrodes, they might be able to make something useful with it.


    They've used buckyballs to bridge a gap, allowing conduction. They've used electric fields to bounce the buckyballs up and down, switching the conduction.

    That sounds to me like a nanometer-scale relay - or getting very close to one.

    Relays are amplifying switches. You can make computers out of them, just as you can make computers out of transistors or tubes. In fact, that's EXACTLY what was used in tabulators for decades, before (and even while) tubes moved in to do the faster stuff, creating the "elecTRONic computer".

    Cray was still using relays to decode the panel display and as an IPL ROM in the Control Data 1604 in the 1960s. Most of the switches in the 1604 were germanium transistors - upgraded to silicon transistors later in its life cycle.

    Indeed, transistors in modern CMOS circuitry are just serving as an approximation of relays. A CMOS logic gate's schematic looks much like the "ladder diagrams" used to this day to design relay-based logic circuits.

    While moving small molecules is slower than moving electrons, it's comparable in speed to moving holes. So at nanometer scales an electromechanical relay, with a bucky ball or a molecular side-chain for the armature, can be an adequately (blazingly!) fast switching element.

    Electrons are light and thus spread out. So they are very sensitive to temperature and have a long cross-talk range. Molecules are more compact and tend to focus electrons as well. So circuitry that uses a molecule, rather than a cloud of electrons, as the moving part in a switch might lead to higher component densities and a broader environmental operating range.
  • by rjamestaylor ( 117847 ) <rjamestaylor@gmail.com> on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @04:06PM (#694539) Journal
    (Re: sugar cube)

    JW Systems Outperforms Imperial Systems in NCMag Benchmarks
    PR News, Jan 12, 2011

    NC Mag (NanoComputer Magazine) names JW Systems' new grain-based nanocomputer system as the winner of the latest SystemSpeed benchmark contest. JW Systems new Red-class servers outperformed its nearest cane-based competitor by more than 400%.

    Imperial Systems, maker of the cubeLast year's leading cane-based system, the Cube, called the tests "unfair" and "biased". However, industry experts had expected these results since the original whitepaper by JW Systems (formerly, Johnny Walker, Inc.) that began the rush to develop the processed-grain-based technology.

    Analyst Dave Wyggert explained, "Candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker."

    JW Systems expects to beat earning expectations this quarter. Also, the company announced a developer's preview of its new Black class of enterprise servers on February 19, 2011. JW Systems was up 3 points in after hours trading; Imperial Systems dropped 3.765 on the sour note.


    Now hiring experienced client- & server-side developers


  • Want the full skinny on C60? Just read:

    The Most Beautiful Molecule
    The Discovery of the Buckball

    ISBN 0-471-10938-x

  • Eventully you run into the same "problem" that crusoe laptops have - namely that the processor is no longer the main consumer of electricity. Even if cpus didn't use any energy you'd still have monitors, printers, scanners, etc.
  • Essentially I don't think we'll ever see the headline: Storage Research Halted. Scientists Declare "We Have More Than Enough Room Now"

    You're absolutely right. It's human nature to consume, whether we need to or we should. Think a 1 MBit/sec internet connection is good enough, wait a year and see if it still is. I thought my 700 MHz Duron would rock for years to come, but I already want a faster one (preferably of the Athlon variety) :-). Basically, we'll never be satisfied until we either a)destroy this place, or b)become amish. I suppose, though, if we destroy this place we still won't be satisfied, there just won't be anyone left to complain.

  • by barawn ( 25691 ) on Wednesday October 18, 2000 @05:27PM (#694543) Homepage
    Of course. Carbon's unique.

    (Then again, so is any element, so that's somewhat redundant.)

    Carbon is the only element capable of forming strong, stable, long bonds in any configuration we feel like. Not only that, since it's perfectly happy to donate an electron as well as accept one, it's perfectly happy bonding with itself.

    It's not hard to figure out why certain elements are 'better' than others - carbon is simply the ideal building block, since I can build *any* structure I want out of carbon, plus maybe a few trace impurities. Now, since carbon is a light element, those bond energies are rather high, since the electrons aren't ridiculously shielded from the nucleus. So now you've got a strong, stable structure made out of one of the most common elements in existence. Oh, I definitely think carbon has a pretty bright future.

    On topic for a moment, I'm greatly amused by this. Buckyballs have literally become a rather amusing joke in the scientific world, since everyone wants to use them for *something* - I've seen an article where they were using buckyballs to fight AIDS, for instance. The downside is that, unfortunately, somehow these plans never come to fruition.

    So, for now, I'm skeptical. Call me back when you have more than just a transistor - say a few logic gates, and when you've got them cheaply.

    Of course, that's an engineering problem.
  • Hard drives are a hack because RAM is so expensive and difficult to maintain without loss (i.e. turn it off, away it goes). With this sort of technology, presumably we'd have a whole new realm of design to consider, such that we don't *need* offline storage (which is what hard drives used to be called) for the CPU to save to in case of power outage.
    You don't have to go far to find such computers... Just look at *OLD* computers with core memory (I even remember seeing an add-on core memory card for an IBM PC computer)... You could turn-off the computer at any time and when you turned it back on, the whole RAM was still there, undisturbed.

    --
    Americans are bred for stupidity.

  • Very amusing post, and if I had points to give right now you would have gotten another from me.

    I will note, however, that this problem has already been solved. MOST ICs are already so small you would not only lose them, but couldn't connect them to anything. Most of an ICs 'package' is there so the damn thing can be handled and wired up to something.
  • The nicest thing about though was that he WASN'T off his rocker.

    I had the priviledge once of taking a course in which Linus Pauling and Bucky both lectured.

    Dr. Pauling was pleasant enough, but you always felt that it would be right to call him "Dr. Pauling."

    Bucky would join me for a picknick lunch on the lawn because he just happened to be passing by. *HE* insisted that I refer to him only as Bucky, and there was no false reverse ostentation about it. Bucky was first and always, in his own mind, just another guy.

    He shall be, and is, missed.
  • And remeber, above all, do not TAUNT Happy BuckyBall.
  • I think it's every good geek's duty to have read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson. ISBN 0-553-57331-4 on my copy. Also, check out all of his other books so far, Snow Crash and Cryptonomicon. They're pretty nice too.
  • Okay, there's a difference between "create" and "record". We've generally created the same amount of information as before, the only difference is, 1. the programs used to store it, and 2. more people are recording their information on computers. All you need to do is recieve another chain letter to know that we are duplicating information far more than we are creating any new instances of it. The information has always been there, and will always be there, weather or not it's recorded in bytes somewhere.

    Also, information overload is caused by our ability to ACCESS more information, not because more information is suddenly there.
    --
  • whoah, man... it's like, it's like I ate the Internet, man!

    far out.....

  • There are no such things as "Gold Electrons." Electrons are electrons; it doesn't matter what element they came from.
  • Carbon has several useful properties:
    1. Being in the top full row of the periodic table, it is rather small, which means that the electrons feel a strong electrostatic potential from the nuclear charge, and therefore can be tightly bound into molecules and more extended structures. In addition, an accident of the fundamental constants means that carbon (and nearby elements on the periodic table) can form multiple bonds to neighboring atoms. One consequence of this is the ability to form continuously bonded atomically thin structures such as graphite. Graphitic structures can then be curved into long thin nanotubes. (Another consequence is the richness of organic chemistry, and biology).
    2. Graphite sheets are also rather unusual in being what are called semi-metals: on the edge between a metal and a semiconductor. Rolling them into a tubular shape is actually enough to push them one way or another into real metals or real semiconductors in carbon nanotubes. Both types can even be combined within a single tube to make diode, etc. on-tube.
    3. The strong in-plane bonding of carbon in graphitic strucures (see point 1 above) means that it is an excellent material for high strength-to-mass applications (if the fibers can be embedded in an appropriate matrix). This also means that the structures could be very thermally stable.
    All that said, there are of course many other issues of science and engineering to be tackled before many applications envisioned become plausible. Though some (e.g. field emission displays, better batteried) might be coming relatively soon.
  • This is a major outstanding problem with nanoelectronics nowadays- the third terminal. It's easy (well, if you have access to about a million dollars worth of e-beam equipment, or a hundred K of scanning probe equipment) to get two contacts onto a nanometer-scale device. The tricky part is the third contact. Typically, the third contact is underneath, the e.g. field-effect lead, and it's very big compared to the rest of the device. One can also do alot with only two contacts, if the device is hysteretic (i.e. has memory of its history).

    Many of the molecular electronics groups, realizing the limits to our current ability in contacting and integrating electronic devices on this scale, are concentrating first on implementing very simple memory architectures. Various aspects and approaches to these ideas are being pursued at many places: several groups at Berkeley (mostly physics), Penn State University (chemistry, elec eng, physics), Harvard (chemistry), Notre Dame (physics), Delft (in Netherlands), HP, Rice (chemistry), IBM, and others. No-one knows yet what if any approach will pan out.

  • i want a HUD builtin to my eyes...

    eudas
  • yeah that'd be real funny up until you start getting ghost-hacks a la 'ghost in the shell'.

    eudas
  • While the points you make are valid in that they increase the storage requirements for information, there's truly more information being generated. Or perhaps I should say "information" (explicit quotes...)

    For one example I'm painfully aware of, the size of reports in the aerospace industry has been increasing over the years -- and by "size" I mean total number of words, total number of figures, and so on. I suspect what's happening is that the effort which was once used to painstakingly correct (or simply do correctly the first time) the data package has now been diverted to the creation of more volume for the package, since correction on a computer-generated document is so easy.

    When I started in the industry back in the early 80's, lots of engineers still wrote out their stuff by hand and gave it to the secretary to type up; they redlined the first draft, and a final copy was made. Now, the engineer types it in in the first place, the software fixes the spelling, and the engineer writes some more (just think how these guys talk... they write the same way! I can say this 'cause I'm one of 'em.).

    Note that aerospace isn't the only place where this is happening -- it's pretty common, in my experience. And I haven't mentioned the amount of data (information) being generated by present-day science; just compare the handful of photos that the early Ranger lunar probes took, with the output of NEAR Shoemaker or Galileo. Or consider genome sequncing. Or numerical simulation of flow in aircraft design. Or numerical simulation of damn near anything.

    I think there's a lot more information being generated, and it's only going to get worse.

    ---

  • I figure that we'll come up with some new "journaling" file system that never overwrites ANY old information, and basically keeps ALL versions of any given file (and maybe redundant copies to boot). Why bother erasing anything if you'll never run out of any room?

    This is pretty much what Netware has been doing forever. It's not a JFS, but it does have the revision control stuff. The main problem I could see with this would be Netwares memory requirements for large volumes (I had a 56GB drive array on a NW4.11 box which needed the better part of a gig of RAM just to mount).

  • We have tiny electrostatic motors, tiny gears, and many other things that are shrinking in size. Is there any group hell-bent on putting all of this nano-stuff together and making something?
    Yeah, really small Matchbox cars.

  • > it's perfectly happy bonding with itself

    Me too! :-)

    But seriously, I did some undergrad work with high temp *super* conducting C60 intercalates - using things like potasium and sodium to fill the gaps in the C60 crystal structure... Groovy stuff with a lot of bright people working on it.
    Here is a link [susx.ac.uk] to the Sussex fullerene research centre....

    If they can pull this off - it would be somat!

    The groups leader Prof Kroto jointly won the Nobel gong in '96

    Of course the holy grail is *room* temp super conductors.
    High temperature (at the moment) wrt super conductors is about 40K!

  • Erm...diamond carbon-carbon bonds are exactly the same strength (give or take a little bit) as other carbon-carbon bonds. It is the high levels of symmetry which are difficult to produce IIRC, and which make diamonds hard.

    Otherwise I agree entirely, we are in an age of high carbon usage. Carefully made synthetic diamond has already been suggested (in SciAm) as a substrate for TFT screens and other annoyingly difficult to manufacture semiconductors.

    Just wait until the chips themselves are made of doped buckyballs connected with nanofibres made of single filament hyperconjugated carbon chains.
    Silicon, germanium, gallium arsenide still have a long way to go but just maybe we're seeing the compounds and concepts that will replace them in a hundred years or so.

    Elgon
  • I don't know about you, but I sure don't want C60 molecules floating around in my body.

    -Chris
  • The best lubricant for many (high temp. high pressure) engineering processes is currently molybdenum disulphide (for example: I coat bullets in it for highpower rifle shooting) as it has a lamellar structure, the layers of which slide over each other nicely.

    I also remember reading somewhere that at really high temperatures and pressures fullerenes tended to become really hard, on the order of tungsten carbide or even diamond. Anyone wanta pour some sand in your engine oil?

    Elgon
  • Oh, that's funny, for a minute there I thought you meant an MSBall (tm) ...

    -Forager

  • >You need interface anways, you can't just will
    >the information from the cube.

    You're assuming it won't have a "force of will" interface.
  • Despite a dozen years of nifty discoveries and Nobel prizes, there hasn't been significant commercial profit from these discoveries (same as UNIX/Linux! and high temp superconductors).

  • RAM is primarly capacitors, unless your dealing with static ram, then you'll see transistors used.
  • by torpor ( 458 )
    I have a few of those in my attic too.

    I also have a Handspring Visor[Palm], which will evolve into a much more powerful computer, I'm sure of it, and it follows the same policy of using a permanent resident store for all data and applications...

    Actually, I believe this is one of the reasons it's such a successful platform - the assumption that all data is always available, and there is no secondary 'commit' stage to offline storage means that the OS can be used a lot more efficiently by the end user ...
  • Like a lot of other people have mentioned, the amount of information accessable to humanity is primarily determined by the methods with which we store it. As we create larger and larger data storage systems, we will also generate that much more data (relevance is another issue altogether however).

    I remember reading recently that the amount of information stored doubles every 4 years. It was given by some librarian-type so I would expect it to be fairly valid. Our storage media, however, has been increasing in size much faster, so I'm not too sure how they correlate. In the end I think the main factor would have to be the number of people that are storing data, and since our population is increasing exponentially, I guess our quantity of information would be following right along our population growth (I know this is rather simplified, but I'm not going to go into demographics and whatnot).

  • I quoted it by going to www.happyfunball.com I only remembered the reference.

"Gravitation cannot be held responsible for people falling in love." -- Albert Einstein

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