Posted: October 16, 2008 | |
New development can lead to self-assembling computers |
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(Nanowerk News) In a breakthrough study, European physicists have developed a unique computer circuit that can build itself - a development that can lead to self-assembling computers. | |
A team of European physicists has developed an integrated circuit that can build itself. The work, appearing in this week's Nature, is an important step towards its ultimate goal - a self-assembling computer. | |
Currently, computer chips are made by etching patterns onto semiconducting wafers using a combination of light and photosensitive chemicals. | |
In the new study, the scientists took a long organic molecule with mobile electrons, called quinquethiophene that acts like a semiconductor and attached it to a long carbon chain with a silicon group at the end, which acts as an anchor. | |
They later soaked the circuit board with preprinted electrodes into a solution of their new molecules. | |
The experiment showed that the molecules got attached to an insulating layer between the electrodes, forming bridges from one electrode to the next. | |
"We dump it in a beaker with a solution of the molecules, we take it out, we wash it, and it works," Nature quoted Dago de Leeuw researcher at Philips Research Laboratories in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, as saying. | |
"The nicest example is DNA," he said. | |
"Our genetic code provides a set of instructions that can be used to marshal molecules into an entire person, and researchers would like to come up with a similar set of compounds able to organize each other into circuits," he added. | |
De Leeuw said that the circuit is truly self-assembling. | |
"The different molecules are like little bricks," said Edsger Smits, another researcher at Philips. | |
"Frankly it worked much better than we expected," he added. | |
Hagen Klauk, an electrical engineer at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research in Stuttgart, Germany found the new technique impressive but said that it still needs improvements. | |
"Self-assembly and nanotechnology is certainly cool, but the one thing missing is higher performance," he added. | |
He also said that the movement of electrons through the circuit would make for a very slow computer. | |
Klauk hopes that improving the characteristics of the molecules and tweaking the technique will eventually lead to self-assembling circuits that out-perform existing technologies, which use thick films of organic molecules. |
Source: ANI |
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