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Science

Integrated Circuits the Size of Molecules 70

Posted by CmdrTaco from the little-yellow-better dept.
RiotNrrrD writes "Electronically Configurable Molecular-Based Logic Gates with "wires" the size of molecules, much smaller than paths created by light or x-rays, have been developed by HP at the Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo Alto. The bottom line is that "In ten years potentially, we will have entire computers not just in your wrist watch, but woven into our clothing. Or a slurry of computers painted on your wall." "
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Integrated Circuits the Size of Molecules

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  • Imagine a little nanomachine you inject in your body that does nothing but run around killing the AIDS virus. Or, imagine fighting the war on drugs by injecting every baby with nanotech machines that seek and destroy varois known drug molecules. You could shoot heroin up your nose into your brain, but it would get eaten by the nanos before it could affect you. Or they could be programmed to rebuild tissue, you could get shot in the leg and be completely healed in two hours. Tons of fun, them nanos.
  • You can do that already with drugs... Paranoia sucks...
  • this is great, technology is finally being made to conform to society instead of vise versa. for those who do not know, MIT has been working on a project coined "oxygen." the concept is interesting, along with some of their uses- this molecular level chip could be just what they are looking for. Interested? read scientific american augest 1999. forgot the mit url, but im sure some of you "addicts..4hr a day" will be able to find it!.
  • Death is inevitable, too, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to take medicine and try to live longer.

    The exact opposite of the Priest's argument in Camus' The Plague

  • hmm (Score:1)

    by andyschm ( 74188 )
    Didn't this happen a few weeks ago? I remember the media was all hyped up on it.

    Apparently from the article I read in Chemical & Engineering News, the transistors in the test-chip are one-way: that is, once they are switched from 0 to 1, they can't go back. Talk about planned obsolecence - you can only do one calculation on thing and its useless.

  • Tis "The Art Of War".
  • That's why you never give it access to those areas of your brain. Of course, it would still leave you open to someone cracking your system and then feeding you bogus visual and/or auditory data. That could get really nasty. If you were a mental health person, you would have to first make sure that the patient wasn't connected to a compromised system, if they appeared to be suffering from halucinations of some kind. The key thing is to never let the system have a level of access where you can't simply pull a plug or whatever, and break the connection. If, however, you had a full sensory interface (visual, auditory, olifactory, tactile inputs, but not necessarily motor control), as oposed to just visual and auditory, how could you ever be sure that you had actually unplugged instead of being fed that input by a program?
  • Anybody who wants to know a little more about nanotechnology shoould read Eric Drexlers book "Engines of Creation" from 1986. Its now freely available on the web.

    http://www.foresight.org/EOC/index.html
  • Kinda gives a new meaning to 'core dump', doesn't it?
  • Heh. To me, the Woodstock of my generation (early 20s) was LinuxWorld Expo in March of '99! It had all the euphoria of a subculture's coming out to the worldand feeling its oats, and quite a bit of the drugs for those interested in partaking (not me). ;) Free love was conspicuously missing, though. ;)

    By the way, don't place too much faith in BlueTooth. Its hardware has some serious power-consumption problems.

    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • what about tattoed into your skin? that would make a wonderful government tracking device for every single person born in the u.s. and they could just tell us its for statistical and identification purposes. go big brother!
  • Great! I always wanted to paint my walls with a Beowulf cluster!
  • From the facts presented in the article, it seems as though costs will rapidly approach those of current ic technology, only much smaller - and possibly even become much cheaper. I mean, yeah, a lot of the things the guy said were pure speculation, but he certainly was talking about a manufacturing process that's cheaper than what goes into a Pentium. And as for the 'they'll get swallowed' argument, we currently have the technology to make a wristwatch that's too small to read - you may have noticed that we don't.
  • The "slurry on the wall" idea is intriguing. If the l'il buggers can be trained, be self-organizing, sorta like some of the neural network simulations...

    Not sure how one does the backfeed for a complex idea like "Hey, stupid, I said 'Feed the fish,' not 'Fry the fish!'"

    The early training would be hell. :)
  • A second thought.. Would that mean that the US Govt. would put export restrictions on paint?
  • All we need now is to figure out an interface w/ our optical and auditory systems and then we could use these puppies to tap in. Wear your computer and have it display directly to your optic nerve. We could even do interfaces to our olifactory (sp?) senses (and you thought you didn't have to shower since you're working from home) and what not.
  • what if you wanna paint your wall?
  • Computers that are woven into our clothes, painted on our walls, all networked with bluetooth or jini, folks this only means one thing and one thing alone. In 2015 woodstock will be one giant beowulf cluster.
  • > "HAVE YOU GUYS BEEN TALKING TO INTEL? I'M THINKING THAT INTEL PENTIUM CHIPS WOULD EITHER BE RUNNING SCARED OR THEY WOULD BE TRYING TO BUY UP YOUR IDEAS."

    Is it my imagination or did the interviewer sound like a complete moron? :) I'd like to count how many times he repeated the question "so it's the size of molecules?"

    You know, I gotta say, I'm scared s***less of the day computers go on our walls, our clothes, etc. I'm already suffering from sensory overload from my computer at work, my two computers at home. I know the Unabomber was a murder and never should have done what he did, but did anyone read his dissertation on technology and society? I'm beginning to think he may have had a very good idea about where all this is headed - surrogate happiness where we value the amount of calculative power we own as being more valuable than freindship and community. I don't know about any of you, but I don't /want/ a computer woven into my clothes. And I'm a Linux geek programmer type 21 year old too. I just think there's a limit to the amount of computers we should have managing our lives.

    G
  • I dunno about this. Much of technology's costs are derived from their advantages and comparisons to current technology and it's going rate. Lots of easy-to-manufacture technologies have sold for nice'n'expensive prices, simply because people will fork over more money for them. (For instance, SCSI hardware .. I can't see how it would be inherently more expensive to make, but its far more expensive than IDE stuff. I could be wrong tho ... :) It's not what it's worth to build, but what it's worth to people. Not that it's a technology, but did you know movie-theatre popcorn is 98% profit? Obviously, the pricing model there has nothing to do with how much it costs to make, but rather how much suckers are willing to pay for it.

  • Yeah, that's true. If you want to skimp on the reading time, you can read the original short story on which the novel was based, also called "Blood Music". It appears at least in the collection Nanotech, edited byJack Dann and Gardner Dozois--a great read. The final novella, David Marusek's "We Were out of our Minds with Joy", is poingnantly beautiful and timeless. (Like all good SF, it transcends the technological trappings of its setting. It's not self-conscious about them; rather, it lets them blend naturally into the plot, residing mostly in the background where they belong.)

    I've found that usually, if you think of a good idea (or even a bad one) related to some putative technology, you can find some SF story that's already used the idea. It's kind of frustrating. I once went to a talk by Douglas Adams where he admitted that he no longer reads SF for just this reason: Either he sees people ripping off his ideas, or he finds ideas he's inadvertantly echoed. Not much fun.

    As long as we're talking about SF, I'd like to trot out this great quotation I came across in the Philip K. Dick novel The Divine Invasion this morning:

    In this way you entered into a dialogue with the Scripture; it became alive. It became a sentient organism that was never twice the same. The Christian- Islamic Church, of course, wanted both the Bible and the Koran frozen forever. If Scripture escaped out from under the church its monopoly departed.

    Sound familiar? ;)

    (Sig screwed up due to Slashdot weirdness)

    Beer recipe: free! #Source
    Cold pints: $2 #Product

  • The secret to constructing these things is using self-assembled monolayers. They use a material.. gold or something, I think... and the rotoxane molecules will lie down in a perfectly uniform pattern all on their own... quite nice, really. Conclusion is, they can't really manipulate them individually - for construction of a nanorobot, say.
  • The "collapsings" the article talks about are also collapsings of distinctions - the disctinctions between hardware and software, and the distinctions between mechanical and electronic. When your information's patterned as shapes of molecules, the hardware is the software and the software shapes the hardware. And when 0s and 1s are represented by flipping the shapes of molecules, you're performing mechanical work with electronic computation. Of course, this is exactly how it works now - EXCEPT that the mapping is far less precise.

    Perhaps this is the destiny of computers: to shape not just the Net, but also the physical world. There's a lot of sand in the Sahara I'd like to pattern my MP3s into.


    >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
    Read The Microsoft Matrix [chrisworth.com] at chrisworth.com [chrisworth.com] for a newbie's struggles towards Linux.
  • A coating of computers? Or possibly a patina.
  • While I think your 'prophet of doom' approach to this technology is perhaps a bit extreme, I totally agree with your opinion of the interviewer. Where did they get this guy? If I were that poor scientist, I would be asking myself, "If this freak asks me what something too small to see LOOKS LIKE one more time, I think I'm going to ram my pen up his nose!"
  • Was your submission handled by one of those new fluor escent monkeys [nandotimes.com]?
  • In fact, what if this has already been accomplished, and all the sensory input you're getting right now is bogus? The red pill or the blue pill? AHH!!! I"M FREAKING MYSELF OUT!!!

    As an aside, I'm in for anything that could teach my fat ass kung fu without actually removing it from my chair. :)
  • WTF? How does making ICs the size of atoms translate to spreadable or wearable computers and why does the interview keep bringing that up? This is in such a theoretical stage that you could pull just about anything from your ass and claim it could be an application, why deal in these inane specifics? "Ohhh... we can make a car out of them that can share processes with the sex bot we made out of them when they are in contact." While such an idea is almost erotic to a nerd such as myself, I couldn't restrain from beating my head against my keyboard everytime the interview interjected. (post script rant: and why would these ICs be changing colors anyway?)
    I'm done now...
    "These aren't the flames we're looking for, you can go about your business... move along"
  • Yeah, and have it interface to our body. That'd be great, unless your system got cracked - imagine a computer virus that makes you empty your rectum when there's more than 50 people in a 100 feet radius around you. Nice.
  • Now, Toto, the nanobots can have a brain!
  • Man, what a cool horror story this subject would make. Out of control nanobots reverse engineer their maker. "Attack of the killer tomatoes" would start to be scarier than it was funny!

  • Can't remember if this is something I saw here in /. so just in case...

    The Virtual Alchemists [techreview.com] - how you'd design such a molecular computer.

    ...and of course if you can make it into an ink, you can just as easily tatoo a computer onto any part of yer body.

  • Or, can I have a "gaggle" of computers? Or, maybe, a "brace"? A "cluster" of computers just doesn't seem to convey the right meaning in this case.
  • This may sound far fetched, but this technology could be used to make the mark or of the beast. I know not many /. readers are religous, but if you are (like me :-)) this could mean a lot.

    BTW - The reasons that the mark has to be on the hand or forehead, is beacuse those are the parts of the body that produce the most heat (which can be used to make electricity).

    That's my 1/50 of $1.00 US
    JM
    Big Brother is watching, vote Libertarian!!
  • Who says it has to be permanent? If you can paint it on the walls, why can't you paint it on yourself?
  • Well, I dunno, but big whoop.

    To people living with a government so controlling that would REQUIRE such an implant (which would give them all sorts of fun ways of locating you, checking what you're doing, verifying that you conform), I should think the end of the world would be more of a release than something to fear.

    Besides, if you take the Bible literally enough to believe direct interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this stuff is going to happen, no matter what you do or say, so railing against it or trying to delay it is as pointless as screaming at the wind.

  • >You know, I gotta say, I'm scared s***less of the day computers go on our walls...

    10 years from now, when an 8 year old reads your post (or other similar such fears) on their "electron wall monitor" or whatever they'll come up with, he'll smile in the same way we now smile at "1984" and it's prophecies.

    Embrace the technology.
  • But that ignores the effect of competition. Remember that billion dollar cost to build a current IC plant, well that tends to cut down on the number of competitors that can enter the market. Also cost of materials for an IC is seriously dwarfed by the other costs of operation. Part of what he was saying sounds like the cost of manufacturing will drop by huge amounts. Of course the cost to develop a part of similiar complexity will probably stay the same. Also remember that current manufacturing techniques have a fairly large startup fee that then gets amortized over the length of the run. So a part with a large run is effectively cheaper than a part less in demand. That may account for part of the difference between things such as SCSI and IDE. If this new technique eliminated or reduced that startup cost then you may see less of a difference (of course the design cost still has to be payed).

    -- Brian Haskin

  • Where do you plug the keyboard?
  • Has anybody brought up the idea of artificial consiousness? I mean, molecular sized....with a mass about the size of a human brain (or bigger), with self evolving self organizing characteristics...it seems quite possible
  • Revelations also says that no man will be able to buy their daily bread without the mark of the beast.... Nanotechnology + the mondex electronic money system + a tatoo?

  • It's long been felt that the first reasonable nanotech creations would be chains of molecules assembled in a biochem process. It looks like these guys have taken it to the step of differentiating the pieces to be able to create them. There's still the macroworld interconnect problem. Do a search on gray goo on any of the nanotech news servers.

    If you're interested in this kind of stuff, check out the work done by Tom Knight at MIT [mit.edu] also. I was at Symbolics with Tom in the mid-80s. He's an amazing person.

  • I know the Unabomber was a murder and never should have done what he did, but did anyone read his dissertation on technology and society?

    My "Intro to Engineering" class read a segment of it in discussion sections. The purpose was to examine argumentative fallacies (it's an english class disguised as an engineering class, or vice versa), but a lot of people chose to look at the content of the excerpt...What he was saying rather than how he was saying it. It turned out that over half of my class agreed with what he was saying about the evils of technology in modern life. And this was a class of engineering students.

    The truly scary thing is that they were trying to use exactly the same arguments that the Unabomber used in the excerpt which we were told, "today we're going to examine common fallacies in argumentative reasoning" before we were handed it. These people didn't seem to realize that a certain argument made just as little sense when they said it as when he said it.

  • To people living with a government so controlling that would REQUIRE such an implant (which would give them all sorts of fun ways of locating you, checking what you're doing, verifying that you conform), I should think the end of the world would be more of a release than something to fear.

    Well, yes. Revelations is a book that is meant to encourage, not frighten, the faithful.

    On the other hand, Christians (at least here in the USA today) have it veeeery comfortable compared to, say, the Roman persecutions that were going on when Revelations was sent around to encourage everyone to hang in there until Jesus comes back in glory. So the idea that yes, this release of the ages is coming, but first you're going to experiece this merciless, totalitarian persecution may not be taken as encouraging to those who have a good deal going today.

    Besides, if you take the Bible literally enough to believe direct interpretation of the Book of Revelations, this stuff is going to happen, no matter what you do or say, so railing against it or trying to delay it is as pointless as screaming at the wind.

    Not necessarily. Death is inevitable, too, but that doesn't mean you're not allowed to take medicine and try to live longer.

    Use of nanocomputers for "branding" and tracking citizens may or may not be "the mark of the Beast." (Personally, I tend now toward an amillenialist interpretation these days, which does *not* require the Mark to be something specific to the last generation. YMMV.) But that doesn't matter. If this becomes a potential application of nanocomputers, it should be opposed because it's an evil and totalitarian thing, not because it might be the "Mark."

    "Civilization has run on ahead of the soul of man, and is producing faster than he can think and give thanks."
    -- G. K. Chesterton

  • I would be interested to know how much the rotoxane molecules change shape when altered electrically, and whether this shape change could be used as a mechanical funtion.

    For example, could a few molecules be strung together into a leg, or a turning mechanism for wheels?

    The applications for this type of IC on the back of a rotoxane limbed nanobot would be unlimited, from fixing computer parts in satellites, space stations, etc, to exploring Mars, the deep sea, your colon. :)

  • Take a step back and look at the parent site, Earthfiles [earthfiles.com]. Take a look at the "Headline News" section. Over half of it seems to be on UFOs and crop circles.

    Just think, twenty years from now, we could have geometric patterns of these things laid out in the middle of cornfields!
  • So now, the goal of this is to have a computer so small, that you can't even SEE the BSOD.

    Out of sight, out of mind.

    "The number of suckers born each minute doubles every 18 months."
    -jafac's law
  • I would love to have a screen painted into my wall.. That would be great to be able to pop any image onto any wall.. computers in my clothes, well.. I can't really see much use in that. Big deal, so my clothes can change colors, or I can surf the web on my pants leg.. hmmm.. that could be cool.. just dont ask what the pointing device would be. :-)

    But a lot of this is just crap. Speculation of the possiblities. Technology is one thing, the consumer market is another. If people don't want computers in their clothes, they won't buy them. And if no one buys them, they stop making them. The world is market-driven. Dont ever think otherwise.

    The potential exists to do a lot of things that aren't done because no-one thinks they're very useful. The "computers in clothes" concept is a by-product of researchers making computing devices smaller and smaller, and they need a way to describe possibilities from this. It may or may not actually occur that way.

    ---

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