Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
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Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
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Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#2I can't be the only person who immediately thinks of the Replicators from SG-1 when self-assembling materials are brought up, right?
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#3I can't be the only person who immediately thinks of the Replicators from SG-1 when self-assembling materials are brought up, right?
Well you can be forgiven for that :-) That particular plot device was full of holes.
But a more interesting associated memory would be Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" and the discussion about obstacles to nanotechnology which include high on the list the ability to actually assemble devices.
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#4Maybe before long we'll start seeing subatomic transistors, along these lines: http://gizmodo.com/5793926/researchers-build-a-transistor-ou...
Or some more possibilities: "In the long term, new switches might be based on magnetic, quantum or even nanomechanical switching principles. One possibility would be to use changes in the spin of an individual electron to represent a 1 or a 0."[1]
[1] After the Transistor, a Leap Into the Microcosm (2009) http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/science/01trans.html?pagew...
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#5I can't be the only person who immediately thinks of the Replicators from SG-1 when self-assembling materials are brought up, right?
Well you can be forgiven for that :-) That particular plot device was full of holes. But a more interesting associated memory would be Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" and the discussion about obstacles to nanotechnology which include high on the list the ability to actually assemble devices.
What were the plot holes with it?
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#6Maybe before long we'll start seeing subatomic transistors, along these lines: http://gizmodo.com/5793926/researchers-build-a-transistor-ou... Or some more possibilities: "In the long term, new switches might be based on magnetic, quantum or even nanomechanical switching principles. One possibility would be to use changes in the spin of an individual electron to represent a 1 or a 0."[1] [1] After the Transistor, a L…
Actually, the transistors mentioned in that article are still bigger than atoms. A single electron stores a 1 or 0, but that electron is still living in a pile of atoms.
(Source: I grew some of the crystals used to build those transistors in the article)
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#7Maybe before long we'll start seeing subatomic transistors, along these lines: http://gizmodo.com/5793926/researchers-build-a-transistor-ou... Or some more possibilities: "In the long term, new switches might be based on magnetic, quantum or even nanomechanical switching principles. One possibility would be to use changes in the spin of an individual electron to represent a 1 or a 0."[1] [1] After the Transistor, a L…
Actually, the transistors mentioned in that article are still bigger than atoms. A single electron stores a 1 or 0, but that electron is still living in a pile of atoms. (Source: I grew some of the crystals used to build those transistors in the article)
Good point. Still, the 1.5nm scale they mention is significantly smaller than anything we have now.
Is it conceivable that we will see a whole new type of electronics on a subatomic scale in the future though? (Where the structure of a chip is not even made out of atoms, but entirely of subatomic particles?)
I actually have an electrical engineering degree, but the couple of materials courses I took back in the early 2000s are starting to feel a bit dated!
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well you can be forgiven for that :-) That particular plot device was full of holes. But a more interesting associated memory would be Eric Drexler's "Engines of Creation" and the discussion about obstacles to nanotechnology which include high on the list the ability to actually assemble devices.
What were the plot holes with it?
Fundamentally, we already have self-replicating robots with nano-level structures that consume materials from their surroundings and build new copies. They're called bacteria. The interesting bit over here is not the observation, but the question why we aren't all covered in bacterial goo miles thick like run-away nano-technology. (we do have them all around us and in us for what its worth)
I think a part of the answer is that if you have free form replication that isn't perfect, then sooner or later something is going to emerge from that goo that realises that it's just more efficient to eat the goo. Combine that self correcting cycle with hard limits imposed by nature (presumably they need to have a power source to make it work - the goo would start to die the minute it gets to a millimetre because of inaccessible sunlight. Then there is toxicity, what happens to the waste? Heat dissipation. Structural issues and other things...) and you have the recipe for a shorter sci-fi series than Firefly. (Dear Mark, today we succeeded in making self replicating nano-robots. They were exponentially multiplying within the petri dish and then they stayed in the petri dish, because apparently nano-robots are tastier than glass and metal. Doesn't matter though, we cracked open the crate of champagne anyway.)
Which is also an argument against von Neumann probes, btw. Perfect replication isn't possible, so sooner or later you are going to see a ton of weird errors accumulate to unpredictable behaviour... (perhaps a shark that goes around "eating" other probes?)
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#9Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, the transistors mentioned in that article are still bigger than atoms. A single electron stores a 1 or 0, but that electron is still living in a pile of atoms. (Source: I grew some of the crystals used to build those transistors in the article)
Good point. Still, the 1.5nm scale they mention is significantly smaller than anything we have now. Is it conceivable that we will see a whole new type of electronics on a subatomic scale in the future though? (Where the structure of a chip is not even made out of atoms, but entirely of subatomic particles?) I actually have an electrical engineering degree, but the couple of materials courses I took back in the early…
It's hard to rule anything out, but I think using non-atomic matter would be very difficult for a few reasons.
(1) Subatomic particles are not necessarily smaller than atoms. Even though in the particle sense, an electron is infinitely small, in the wave sense, an electron can extend over a volume much larger than a single atom. So it's not necessarily the case that a subatomic particle like an electron is smaller than an atom. (Also, the positive charge of the nucleus actually helps shrink the electron's range. So adding positive particles can end up making the system smaller.)
(2) If you want a transistor every 1.5 nm, then you probably need at least one particle every 1.5 nm. And the only way you can pack matter that densely is if it's charge neutral (a clump of singly charged particles would immediately disperse from electric repulsion). So you either need a combination of positive and negative particles (atoms), or neutral particles like photons/neutrons/neutrinos. The problem with neutral particles is that there's no long-range forces to keep them in whatever structure you design. Gravity is too weak at that scale, and electromagnetism has no effect because they are neutral. Perhaps photons could be used for computation, but without using atoms for mirrors/lenses/waveguides/etc it's hard for me to imagine how.
TL;DR: Atoms are an efficient way to pack particles and preserve structure. It's hard to imagine doing it with a plasma or gas or something else.
Re: Self-Assembly Shows Promise for Extending Moore’s Law
#10What exactly is the holdup with extreme ultraviolet sources? I remember reading an article that said synchrotrons could generate x-ray beams with the power density of a blowtorch, and some others suggesting free-electron lasers should be able to generate anything down to hard x-rays with more or less arbitrarily high power density; why don't these suffice?