Atom-sized Computer Chips Coming Soon

Moore's law has been a driving force in computer technology development for years.  Initially offered as an observation of the fledgling industry in 1965, computer-manufacturers reacted to his statement that the number of transistors per chip would double every year the way a frat responds to the statement "You guys are too wussy to drink all that."  He later insisted he said "double every two years", and perhaps as a compromise everyone believes he said eighteen months.  But even Moore only believe that would hold for a decade, and you might notice it's a little after 1975.  A seventies computer scientists could have snorted raw acid mixed with batteries and still not have dreamed how far the machines have come.

But still, the exponential increases couldn't continue forever and it seems we've finally slammed into the cold, hard wall of physics. University of Manchester scientists claim to have developed a one-nanometer scale transistor (about five atoms across). Unless you discover some micro-molecules on your next trip in the Fantasticar, there's very little else to be done. 

The scientists have broken through the usual ten nanometer lower limit at which silicon stops acting like an electronic component and more like individual atoms by using graphene, the one-atom thick layered crystallized silicon that has recently drawn so much attention.  By cutting channels with electron-lithography, Dr Novoselov and colleagues can create small quantum dots which can act as ultraminiaturised transistors, storing and manipulating the all important 1 and 0 bits with the application of voltages.

What does this mean for you?  Ultra-powerful computers, which is nice. Graphene isn't practical as a manufacturing material just yet, with minor issues like "being incredibly difficult and expensive to make" and "not exactly understood just yet", but the jump from experiment to application is shorter nowadays than it has ever been.  Especially when you have a little thing like "the entire electronics industry" funding the efforts.  This will take a while though, so Dell needn't worry about lacking new models to foist horribly annoying actor-salesmen on for a few years yet.

It will happen though, and after that point expect to see some major changes in computer technology.  It's not as if the computing mega-corporations will just shrug and go "Well, guess we'd better find something else to do."  With a lack of bigger and better numbers/made-up words to put after the name "Intel" there will be huge efforts invested in enhancing every other part of the computing experience. 

In a newly flattened hardware playing field, you can look forward to increasingly bizarre attempts to stand out from an identical field. Software engineering will enjoy a renaissance, as developers are told "This chip is really as good as it gets, extract everything you can from it".  Networked computing will become the new standard, will gridded supercomputers becoming collaborative efforts among peers, not just peer-reviewed scientists.  Other kinds of computers have been suggested, but none of the options (mechanical, DNA-based or others) are remotely suitable for the same kinds of computations as we're used to, never mind that they'd need decades of research to catch up on the work already done in silicon.

But don't worry.  They'll still find a way to enforce the true industry meaning of Moore's law: "You will want to buy a new computer every eighteen months."

Posted by Luke McKinney.

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Related Galaxy posts:

Quantum Computing & the Future of the Human Species -A Galaxy Insight
End of Moore's Law -New Future of the Computer Chip Predicted

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One atom chip

Comments

[CadMasterAdam]

"the one-atom thick layered crystallized silicon that has recently drawn so much attention"

Jesus, you know this is wrong, fix it.

[knoxvilledaniel]

Molecule sized computer chips I think I could possibly believe in -Atom sized ones are a bit much to get my head around. Wouldn't electron microscopes be needed, & wouldn't there be a limit to their resolution after ten nanometers ?

[Saudi]

The samll drives the bigs, like what Israel does to the USA.