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Posted on 06/13/2002 8:00:35 AM PDT by dead
Scientists at Cornell University in New York have built a transistor just one atom wide.
Transistors, traditionally made from silicon, regulate the passage of electric current and form the basis of electronic circuits. Until now the smallest transistors - lauded in 1997 as a breakthrough - were 182 atoms wide.
Tinier transistors allow many advances - such as mobile phones and portable computers that weigh less - but have battery lives of a month or longer.
The latest news may spell an end to Moore's Law - a tenet of microprocessor engineering that says computer chips double in power every 18 months.
Many scientists believe transistors cannot get any smaller than one atom in size, which means new technologies would have to be invented for Moore's Law to stay relevant.
The scientists at Cornell University implanted a "designer" molecule between two gold electrodes to create a circuit.
At its heart was a cobalt atom surrounded by carbon and hydrogen atoms and held in place by "handles" made of the benzene-like chemical pyridine. When voltage was applied to the transistor, electrons passed from one side to the other by "hopping on and off" the cobalt atom.
The research, led by Paul McEuen, professor of physics at Cornell, was described yesterday in the journal Nature.
Press Association
Unfortunately, before their feat could be independently verified, they misplaced the one atom wide transistor. They're still looking for it.
"remember when we used to have those clunky one atom transistors? Man were they slow."
A Meg of memory? who would ever need that much?
A gig hard drive? Impossible!
Buy an Apple!
Ooops, that's the mouse that only has one key
Would a monitor with only one pixel suffice?
A human can see an image of something as complex as a human being. The human can be facing the camera, or in profile. Standing up or stiting down. Dresses in rags or in the latest fashion, and we can recognize them in an instant. Computers are not even close to human performance. But they will be.
The first computer was invented by a man names Babbage who worked on it from 1799 to 1840. His computing device had RAM and ROM, program instructions, input, and output. His research was paid for by the British government. The problem was he only had metal and wood from which to build it.
The first digital computers used radio tubes. They needed tons of electricity. A single byte of data needed 8 coils of wire around 8 magnets to store it. The invention of transistors did away with tubes only to quickly followed by integrated circuits. Today we are reaching the limit of integrated solid state devices just as we did 40 years ago with tubes.
The new organic devices will replace solid state as easily and as quickly as the tranistor replaced the tube and the integrated circuit replaced the individual transistor.
People have been publishing such articles since at least the 1880s. Then they wanted the government to stop wasting money on the patent office. It seems there were lots of people in 1880 who were certain that everything had already been invented.
Moores law could speed up. It is unlikely to slow down. The world is full of creative people.... except for journalists.
You need to remember that
So long as it had video RAM with only one byte.
The human race will be obsolete within 50 years.
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