| Posted: October 16, 2008 |
New development can lead to self-assembling computers |
|
(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.
|
