IBM Demos Atomic-Scale Circuitry 100
Christopher Pereda sends us a LA Times story about IBM demonstrating atomic scale circuitry. Or see IBM's press release. Who needs Coppermine?
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IBM Demos Atomic-Scale Circuitry
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Perfection is acheived only on the point of collapse. - C. N. Parkinson
Re:How do you read the "mirage" (Score:1)
- Xobes
Re:*The* Nanotech Book? (Score:3)
Drexler's written a couple major nanotech books, Engines of Creation which is basically the what of nanotech, and the big one, Nanosystems, which is the how.
Nanosystems is a highly technical (and through no fault of its own, hard for me to understand) book, but if you'll spend a little time with it, it'll prove to be absolutely fascinating. It's somewhat expensive (around textbook prices) but certainly well worth it, especially if you have groundings in chemistry and physics. It's *the* nanotech book of today, and likely will be for quite some time to come.
-jay
Quantum Physics (Score:1)
Re:Its about time... (Score:2)
Re: 3D chips (Score:2)
built into a chip that is not 1cm^2 but 1cm^3 in area! (I worry about heat dissapation though).
Hate to burst your bubble, but they already thought of it, and are using it (in limited amounts) in current processors and chips. Heat is always a problem, as well as parasitic currents causing latch-up problems. There should be examples in VLSI books. I am nowhere near any of mine right now, so I can't give an example. Anyway, making a large circuit like this would be a pain in the butt to design, as well as fabricate. I couldn't see this kind of tech going too far anywhere in the future (with current materials)
It could sure revultionize embedded tech (Score:1)
Cheap power (Score:1)
Re:Open Source Nano-Gates! (Score:1)
Re:incredible power (sort of) (Score:1)
Yeah, a cupful of future computers may have the power of all of the processors today, but just imagine the system requirements of Win3k! "MOM, I need another 10 terrabytes of L1 cache or quake will be choppy!"
On a side note, does anyone really believe that nanotech is that amazing? Look at your cells. Nature has been there and done that, probably more efficiently than we will ever be able to do it.
Binary? (Score:3)
The problem with anything much more than binary is that you'd have to drastically increase the voltage to get any sort of differentiation between different voltage states, or you would have to delay the reactor to wait until the initial spike levels out, which would defeat any speed enhancement +binary would give you.
It would seem to me that these "nanotechnology" advancements would give us a much more refined control, a much more liberal control, over what is going on electrically, and allow a vast amount of <i>states</i> that the relay could be set at.
Are there any nanotech/quantum/electric buffs out there who could add a little reality insight to this theory? I do not know enough about it to really go beyond wondering.
Rejected at 23:36 Feb 02 (Score:1)
Sorta funny how things that are rejected
(multiple times it would seem) somehow become
important days later.
Whoops (Score:1)
Re:Open Source Nano-Gates! (Score:1)
However, I still think there should be a shape that has 3 focus points - maybe. Or at least a series of shapes - any ideas?
Re:How do you read the "mirage" (Score:1)
recycled quantum corral, quantum chaos (Score:1)
I read Eigler's quantum corral paper in '93 and have seen him promote this stuff at science conferences.
The quantum corral (a bunch of electronic wiggles inside a ring of atoms on a surface) was due to Cu surface states quantized by the ring boundary (a quantum size effect). Not a big deal, we've known about the existence of Cu surface states for several decades, they show up in photoemission experiments.
If you make a stadium shape instead of a circular ring, you get strange chaotic wiggles (instead of the symmetric cylindrical Bessel functions), that in the '80s were hyped as "quantum chaos".
Now it's hyped as quantum computing. Oh brother. There are more obvious, simple, and more easily engineered ways of getting information from point A to point B without wires, such as by transmitting light.
Re:incredible power (sort of) (Score:2)
You misunderstood me on this point.
Sure, you have temporary flaws from minor injuries. But no amount of healing is going to fix the flaws in the "design" of your body. Your blood vessels will never move from in front of your retina to behind, increasing your vision. Your urethra will never stop going through your prostate (yes, a collapsable tube running through an organ that has a tendency to expand). And check the Talk.Origins web site for plenty more examples of these kinds of flaws in living creatures.
Nature is not perfect. Far from it.
f you think we can do better with metal and silicon than nature has done with carbohydrates and proteins, I would be suprised.
Do nuclear weapons count? I think they're a tad more effective. And there's always the black goo/grey goo scenarios, that if they were to occur, could quite possibly destroy ALL life on (and in) the planet, rendering it completely uninhabitable.
---
Re:incredible power (sort of) (Score:2)
There are a number of methods that can be implemented to attempt to keep this sort of thing from happening.
First of all, self-replicating nanomachines may not need to be commonplace - we may be able to get away with ONLY having assemblers doing the construction/replication, and never build this ability into anything else.
Second, we can implement various checks to help prevent it. Require a nanomachine to compare itself with x neighbors before it can duplicate itself. If it stores instructions in itself somewhere, then make it two sets stored in different locations (maybe in different ways), and if the two do not match exactly, self destruct. In any group of "wild" replicators, require a certain percentage of them to be police nanomachines, checking the others for flaws.
It's true that no method can prevent it from ever happening, but we can make it so unlikely as to rest at ease.
And we can always just create the instructions and structures in ways that any "mutation" will be much more likely to make it non-operational.
---
Re:Binary? (Score:1)
- They make a better/faster/cheaper binary system, it can be plugged right in.
- They make a trinary system...whoops, there goes their investment. Almost nobody else pays much attention because everyone else is working with binary systems.
- They make a quad system...the natural and overwhelmingly popular thought will be, "Hey, 4 = 2*2, so each 'bit' here is really two 'bits' that I'm used to."
And so forth.Re:*The* Nanotech Book? (Score:1)
IBM could jump on the bandwagon... (Score:1)
*sigh*
Very very cold (Score:1)
1+1=3 (Score:1)
Geez, if they can't even get that right.
Re:What's a latime? (offtopic) (Score:1)
--
Moore's Law (Score:1)
Re:Its about time... (Score:2)
Re:incredible power (sort of) (Score:2)
Yes, nature does things quite efficiently. But not even near optimal.
The nervous system in our body uses electrical impulses to transmit the sensory data. But that's not even close to the speed at which computers transmit their data.
The bones in our body grow and are alive, so they can't possibly have the strength of the "skeletons" we use for cars and buildings.
We can already do some things better than nature ever could. Evolution isn't going to bother making something optimal if it doesn't really deliver a substantial benefit. It doesn't even guarantee there won't be any serious flaws - most living things, in fact, have these "flaws".
---
Re:IBM could jump on the bandwagon... (Score:1)
Quantum sine functions? (Score:2)
Thanks,
D-rock
But...why? (Score:1)
This is an example of the power of the internet (Score:1)
Zipwow
Re:Binary? (Score:1)
There is really only one application for a triany(or larger) system of computing, artificial intelligence. With some of the chemical computers in the works, that would move at nearly instantaneous speeds, the only way to get better computing power is for the computer to know what you want before you do. There is a lot of work going into artificial intelligence, mainly by a group called the "Singultarians." http://pobox.com/~sentinence/singularity.html With a multi-nary computer system, you could possibly simulate the computing power of the human brain. Some people (like me!) think that the only way you can effectively simulate a human brian would require a quantum computer, which thev've been making some really interesting inroads into lately.
I don't see much use for nanotechnology as a computer system, its far too powerful for that application. What your likely to see with nanotechnology are a bunch of self-replicating builder bots, building things from the atomic level up, rather than the melecular level(or greater) down as we do now.
Quantum computers on the other hand, have a lot of potential for the trinary(or more) structure. The way a quantum computer works (waaaaaaaay oversimplified for brevity) is rather than the processing actually being done in this dimension, it gets shipped off to other universes, computed, and then all we get is the result, without doing any of the physical work. Mostly they are looking towards quantum computers for data encryption, but thats really only the tip of the iceberg.
Computerized clothing?.. (Score:2)
Just imagine if your laundry could sniff itself and tell you if you could wear it one more day without your even having to get out of bed! Anyone have any other ideas?
*The* Nanotech Book? (Score:2)
"Just as solid state transistors transformed earlier computers from room-sized behemoths into hand-held marvels, nanotechnology could create a super-intelligent, yet microscopic, devices, according to Eric Drexler, author of "Engines of Creation," a seminal book on nanotechnology."
Is this claim valid? I'd be interested in hearing what people consider to be *the* book of nanotech. Is there an Applied Cryptography style tome, that presumes moderate intelligence, but not much actual background? Hemos, you have an opinion here?
And don't tell me "Diamond Age".
Johnathan
oooo... the future!!! I'm so impressed (Score:1)
Not too excited (Score:1)
Could this be the first step towards nanobots? Spoooky....
I'll just get these out of the way... (Score:1)
#1 WooHoo, imagine a beowulf cluster of these!!!!!! It could fit in a shoebox!!!!!
#2 Will it run linux??????
--Shoeboy
Its about time... (Score:2)
Read the press release-m not the LA Times article (Score:1)
And you thought a P3 was expensive... (Score:1)
But how soon really? (Score:2)
What I would like to see in the meantime is chip technology moving into a three dimensional arrangement. As it stands now, most chips are basically flat. Imagine the power that could be built into a chip that is not 1cm^2 but 1cm^3 in area! (I worry about heat dissapation though).
This nanotech is a step in the right direction, for as far as I know circuts cannot be made any smaller than this (due to quantum uncertanty).
Now imagine the same idea as above, taking these atoms and building them on a tier-level as opposed to a plane. Imagine the power of a 1cm^3 cube built in this manner!
For a more interesting perspective on nanotechnology I reccomend: ENGINES of CREATION The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler. (I just started reading it thats why I posted this
It's a first step, of many... (Score:3)
We've seen STM pictures that show an echo of one atom, but does that mean that the STM is innacurate, and the image is being distorted by the ring of atoms? Or does it mean that the atom actually appears, at an atomic level, to be in both positions?
If it's just an artifact of the STM, then you'd need to use an STM to view this echo, and it won't be of much use. If it's actually an echo of the atom in the new position, then you should be able to detect a change in the atomic property at that location somehow. If it uses electrons as waves, focusing them, like the whisper room does sound, then surely an atom at the other focal point would be effected.
And, if this does effectively change the atomic state at a distance, in a way that can be read without an STM, then you'll only need transistors, and a way to move the atoms and you'll basically have the tools for a CPU. Perhaps, if this works, putting two source atoms in, such that both cast an echo in the same spot, could be used as a transistor, where both need to be in place, and echoing on the output, for the output to change.
But, a circuit needs to change. If you use voltage, the voltage can easily be changed. If you use the position of atoms, how do you move them?
So, you need three things, one of which they might have part of. Signal paths, gates, and changeable states.
They do have a signal path, but not over an arbitrary path, and it would be hard to extend, because you'd need two interlocking rings, one so that the echo of the first created its own echo. But, that would mess up their elipse and probably stop the echo from being created in the first place.
Any ideas on how to overcome these issues?
here's one (Score:1)
Report to your spouse that it's splashed with sexual fluids not matching your spouse's
Great.. (Score:1)
Re:How do you read the "mirage" (Score:1)
They can read it already - you see the mirage in the image in the LA Times article. Of course "detecting" the mirage will produce side-effects, no problem if those effects aren't enough to push around the real atom. Don't be confused by the uncertainity principle - it doesn't mean you can't detect stuff on the quantum level. It is merely a limit on how much information (of different kinds) you can get simultaneously.
Changeable states (Score:1)
Re:Another link with more info ... (Score:1)
Re:*The* Nanotech Book? (Score:1)
Re:Its about time... (Score:2)
Oh sure, until the janitor comes in and vacuums up your LAN.
Re:How do you read the "mirage" (Score:5)
This 'echo' is actually an echo of something called the Kondo effect. Basically, when you have a single magnetic molecule (like cobalt) in a non-magnetic metal (like copper) and you lower the temperature, the electrons on the surface of the copper begin to align their spins to cancel the magnetic moment of the cobalt atom. At sufficiently low temp, these shielding electrons enter a many-particle single-spin quantum state that completely masks the cobalt's magnetic moment. This is the Kondo effect. The ellipse on the Cu surface creates a number of possible waveforms (more properly, eigenstates) that can refocus this resonance to the other focus - creating another Kondo effect where there is no cobalt atom. This effect can be measured with a STM (scanning-tunneling electron microscope). IIRC, STM uses a very, very fine molecular 'tip' that is passed above the sample. As the tip moves over an atomic surface, a tunnelling current is generated that is proportional to the distance between the tip and the sample. This is commonly used to generate topographic maps of electron density around single atoms.
Theoretically, this resonance could be used to sample the orientation of a magnetic molecule at a distance. Of course, measuring this moment would disrupt it as per Heisenberg's Uncertaintly Principle, but in this experiment, they are only measuring the presence of the field, not its orientation. Since the effect disappears when the Co atom is moved off the focus of the ellipse, this could also be used sense small movements of atoms at a distance. And it could be used to link the quantum states of two molecules at a distance on a surface, effectively forming a specific quantum 'wire'. They also speculate that ellipsoids could be used to do this in a 3D solid.
Don't get too excited - the effect only happens at 4K (brrrrr) and an electron microscope is a rather impractical sensor, so don't look for it any time soon. But its still cool.
I may very well have butchered some or all of this explanation. I welcome any corrections or clarifications.
Re:It's a first step, of many... (Score:2)
1. The central atom is moved around and extracted by the STM tip, so if a device is going to use this we have to some how miniturize an STM like tip to mecanically remove atoms and place them when needed, most likely, one per elliptical ring. This would be a Nobel level achievement in and of itself! My opinion is that a mechanical (yes this is mechanical because it require physical movement) device would not be practical, but I would love to be proved wrong on this. I personally see a structure like this being used to resonate wave states generated by an applied voltage, thus allow for more a more quickly cycled device.
2. Another concern is stability. They had to operate at 4K in order to prevent thermal fluctuation to destroy the device. Personally, I don't want something that is 4K on my shirt. Also, how will the quantum states change (the miarge image) once the device has been embedded to protect the device from the environment (scratching, bumping, etc.), and once embedded can the atoms still be moved around.
3. One more major issue is how to make these devices. They made it atom by atom. How could this be done on the 10^9 or 10^12 scale of devices needing to be produced every day? Can this be cost effectively done? If it can't, then it will never reach us the consumer.
These are questions that need to be answered along with many more before we can ever use such devices practically. This is definitely a neat discovery, however, there are much bigger barriers than this to overcome if we are ever going to get this type of technology to the level where everyone can have one at a resonable cost and have it last long enough to justify spending the money. This represent the equivalent of another baby-step in the direction of getting such devices publically available. So, we need the mentioned IBM group and other groups to keep up the great work to help us break down some of these other barriers.
Re:It's a first step, of many... (Score:1)
As I understand it, the degree of imaging quality is dependent on both the surface topography of the sample and that of the STM tip.
Basically, to improve the resolution of the STM and retard convolution, you need to reduce the radius of curvature of the tip as well as reducing its cone angle (think of the tip as a cylindrical wire with a cone at its apex). The aim is to have a single atom at the summit, in an orientation that negates any contribution from neighbouring atoms.
This comes out from the physics of quantum tunnelling where the tunnelling current is exponentially dependent on the separation between tip and sample. If you can engineer a single atom tip with a convolution negating orientation (say a single atom pillar that remains at a right angle to the sample topography at all times, no matter how bumpy the surface).
Or does it mean that the atom actually appears, at an atomic level, to be in both positions?
Remember collapsing the wavefunction on measurement? It's an observable event not a probability.
I've probably rambled on enough... As an aside I recently learnt about the great frank Zappa's take on chance -> you have a 50% chance of becoming homeless, either you do or you don't.
*cryptic comment* Particularly apt. */cryptic comment*
Re:How do you read the "mirage" (Score:1)
- The reflection analogy is very valid. Instead of sound or light waves reflecting, these are matter waves consisting of electrons. The Co electrons affect the Cu electrons in such a way that the Cu electrons collectivly produce an image of the Co electrons at the other focus. Note that this is an electron image, not a copy of the whole atom ("non-magnetic" electrons and the nucleus are not reflected).
- The interact of the Co magnetic moment with the Cu moments (Kondo effect) is a quantum magnetic effect. That is, it is based on the spin orientation of the electrons. The STM measurement is a quantum electrical effect--it cannot measure the spin orientation of electrons. Too bad, because a cool effect would be to flip the Co moment back and forth and then detect that (indirectly!) at the other focus.
- Because the spin orientation is not measured, only the presence or non-presence of the Co atom can be measured. You have to move the Co in and out of the focus to cause a measureable change. I'm not sure how practical such a system would be--moving atoms in order to more electrons a few nm's away...
In conclusion, this is intriguing demonstration of quatum effects which have been used in many other experiments/demos over the last 50 years. A new demo of well-known effects. These effects can be applied (well, quantum effects are already the basis of most electronics and magnetic devices--vacuum tube operation can only be explained by quantum tunneling!), but new applications won't rely on this demo any more than any other demo of basic quantum effects. (IAAP)Open Source Nano-Gates! (Score:1)
These devices rely on what appears to be a weird focusing effect of the wave-like behavior of atoms. In theory, if you can do it with wave-guides, maybe you can do it with nano.
Right now, they have a "straight" style wave guide - the wave at one end focusing and creating an image at the other end of the ring. What if you made, instead of a ring shape, a cardoid (I think that is right) shape - in other words, think of a "rounded bottom" heart.
If done right, maybe an atom placed at one of the lobes of the heart would be too weak to "focus" strongly at the bottom of the heart, but place one in each lobe, and it would form a good and solid image at the bottom (due to the images overlapping?).
A slightly modified form of this same AND gate might be able to produce an OR style gate (just get it to be able to take one of the two inputs at the lobes and focus it properly).
I am not sure how you would be able to do a NOT gate - would such a gate even be possible (I am imagining the wave nature of the particles - if the particle isn't there, how do you get another in a different area to appear?)...
Can a cardoid shape be made (did they use a ring because the configuration was stable)?
Amplifiers for the "signals" will also have to be made (how do you build a wave amplifier? Some kind of resonance thing?)...
Re:Open Source Nano-Gates! (Score:1)
Imagine a chain - each link on the chain is one of these ellipse rings, perpendicular to each other, with the ring surrounding the focal points (so that the rings don't actually touch, but merely enclose the focal points). Now, when an atom is placed at the focus, and the image appears at the other focus, the next link will carry it one (albeit with further degradation, I would suppose).
Imagine the links to be the gate inputs/outputs and you can see how this could be used.
As far as a NOT gate is concerned, maybe some priciple of phase canceling waves could be used here - I am not a physicist, and especially not a quantum physicist, but I am thinking that if you took the cardoid shape gate, and put a particle that had a 180 phase inverted wave symmetry in one lobe, then the presence or absence of a particle in the other lobe (with opposite symmetry), would cause the image to appear/disappear on the other end, creating a NOT'ed-style output...
Maybe...
For the chain thing to work - we have to learn to manipulate these atoms in 3D (rather than work on a 2D atomic surface)...
Could the power consumption be too small? (Score:1)
If it takes such little amounts of energy, how would such a device react to larger 'jolts' of electricity such as static buildup in clothes?
Would this not potentially damage these devices, if not, cause them to act strangely?
Re:incredible power (sort of) (Score:2)
Well, yes and no. Signals going through the brain are about the same speed. From your foot to your brain, yeah there is latency. This is why reflex reactions are processed in the spinal column.
>The bones in our body grow and are alive, so they can't possibly have the strength of the "skeletons" we use for cars and buildings.
Your bones are nasty strong under compression. Your femur can hold several thousand pounds, and it actually experiences loads like this during running.
>most living things, in fact, have these "flaws".
I dinged my car yesterday. It has a flaw now. I dinged my toe on the coffe table two days ago. I am not flawed anymore. I am alive, and therefore can heal (most stuff) back to normal. Nanoprobes are nice, but they will not last forever. If damaged, will they self repair? Where will they find the metals to repair themselves with? If they cannot self repair, then the whole spying idea is moot. I will just expose myself to a magnetic pulse and short them out. (or nonleathal amount of radiation).
Here is my point. We have small "computers" already that contain a set of design and operating instructions on a small tape with error correction coding. The computer has sensors for light, temperature, touch, and various chemical detectors. It has motors for movement and operates on electricity. It is in every top secret installation in the world and is capable of killing humans. Sounds nasty? We call them germs. Heck, any protozoa will qualify. If you think we can do better with metal and silicon than nature has done with carbohydrates and proteins, I would be suprised.
Re:completely OT (Score:1)
Checkout the threads under Wednesday's article about "CERT advisory on malicious HTML tags" for nifty tricks.
how will this affect classroom learning? (Score:1)
Another link with more info ... (Score:3)
link [mercurycenter.com]
Re:But how soon really? (Score:2)
Actually this is a very good point, and one that could tie in nicely with another emerging technology, quantum processors.
Just grabbing the nearest link, you can read a fairly detailed exploration of the idea of quantum computers here. [qubit.org] (With another bit of reading here [cordis.lu])
Wouldn't it be interesting to consider pursuing the idea of quantum-level circuits, with perhaps some form of quantum circuit-control that takes full advantage of the nature of quantum matter?
I can imagine that the computing industry already has such vast momentum in terms of making things smaller and faster that the barrier of quantum mechanics will be one that is eventually broken, or at least bent to the will of computer manufacturers.
When that happens, we might see single-processor lateral processing as well as fully integrated quantum circuitry with near-instantaneous feedback (or even instantaneous, if quantum entanglement can be leveraged?).
Very interesting, and exciting stuff
B.
Re:*The* Nanotech Book? (Score:2)
Drexler has written possibly the nanotech book, available online in html form at:
http://www.foresight.org/EOC/
It was written in 1986; some of its predictions, like de novo protein design and atom manipulators like the atom force microscope have come true. Most of what is written there hasn't yet been implemented; but, if we're heading towards a technological singularity, then about half of the technologies will be developed in the last year before the singularity.
How do you read the "mirage" (Score:5)
Anyway, what interest me far more is how IBM plans to read the state of this "circuit" without causing a sever disruption, per the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. You can turn the device on or off by pushing the odd cobalt atom around, but surely attempting a read operation on the device would cause its state to alter? Does anyone have ideas as to how they would avoid this?
-konstant
Yes! We are all individuals! I'm not!
Why do reporters keep inflating news? (Score:2)
incredible power (Score:1)
Wow! (Score:1)
Re:Not too excited (Score:3)
nanotech = dangerous (Score:1)
sorry, my post went through twice (Score:1)
Food for thought. (Score:3)
Please excuse IBM for proving something we have all suspected for most of our geek lives. Give credit where its due.
It seems to me that at this point its all a matter of arranging these little mirage pools such that the output of two produce enough of a mirage in a third to produce an output in the third.
-^------^-
-^--------^--
-^------^-
something like that. if you can make it so that both inputs are required to produce an output, you have a logic gate. The spacing would determine whether or not it was an AND or OR gate.
NAND and NOR should be a simple matter of reversing the output's connection to the next pool(s) in line.
I really don't see this as far off in the future.
My LCARS may not be too far off after all...
Auto-zipping jeans? That sounds dangerous!! (Score:2)
- Jeans that zip up for you.
I don't know about you but I definitely would never buy jeans that zipped for me. There are many dangerous implications involved. =8-oRe:Read the press release-m not the LA Times artic (Score:1)
No kidding! Just think, computers will be "infinitely small" and "infinitely powerful". So much for language having any meaning.
This is nothing new... (Score:3)
another example of media hype (Score:2)
Here's the big development.........
This is just like a transistor.. if you remove the atom the effect dissapears! Now all you have to do is figure out how to add and remove atoms rapidly from the corral to switch between ones and zeroes! Great, the newest smallest fastest computer on earth has just been invented.....NOT
can you say HYPE
HYPE
I actually hope I've misunderstood this because this type of media hype gives the great basic science they are doing here a bad name
Tell me it aint so
How Would it Work? (Score:1)
Eventually all of these technical challenges may be resolved and an actual working prototype developed, but I am pretty much convinced that it is still a long way off yet.
Nathaniel P. Wilkerson
NPS Internet Solutions, LLC
www.npsis.com [npsis.com]
Re:How Would it Work? (Score:1)
As far as I can tell from the IBM press release, there is no uncertainty here. The 'mirage' always appears. It is an effect that is predicted by whatever theory this is based on, so probability doesn't have much to do with it (except maybe to explain why the mirage effect's intensity is only one third of the original atom's).