Your news round-up from
the big world of the incredibly small. June 2001 edition
Time for another brief
snippet of the weird world of the incredibly small. There's been a lot
of talk the past two months. There's been action and new discoveries too,
but the world is still trying to get to grips with the concept of nanotechnology.
The governments of America, South Korea, Japan and China
have all committed hundreds of millions of dollars (in some cases billions)
to research and develop nanotechnology - this is on top of what private
companies like Intel, Fujitsu and IBM are doing. US-based newspapers have
been calling for a greater focus and larger budgets for nanotechnology,
even the US farmer's
union wants to know what's in it for them, and of course the US Army
is very, very interested in the subject.
The
Transistor Wars
IBM and Intel seem to be having a war to see who can make the smallest,
fastest transistor. A sort of "my thing is smaller than your thing" competition.
Intel
started it off with claims that they has successfully made a few transistors
only 70-80 atoms across that could switch on and off at up to 1.5 trillion
times a second (1.5THz). By the time they get the manufacturing licked
in 2007, they reckon this will have computers running 10-20 times faster
than they do today. Whether they're fast enough for most of us at the moment
or not is a moot point.
IBM has been making the smallest, fastest transistors yet out of only
a few hundred atoms. More interestingly they've sold their patent on ways
to wire up nano-sized circuits, which probably means they've got something
else up their tiny little sleeve that they are going to use instead.
So where will it stop? When will we have made these electronic, logic-driven,
rule-following, number-crunchers as small and as fast as a small fast thing
can be? Intel's Dr. Marcyk is reported to have said that every time he
presented his results to the company's chairman Andrew S. Grove, Dr. Grove
says to him, "I want you to show me the limit." To which Dr. Marcyk has
so far had to reply "Andy, I haven't found the limit yet."
Surfing
The Light Fantastic
The obvious problem with building things from atoms is how to get hold
of the little beggars, and point them in the right direction. A process
complicated by the fact that you can't see what you're doing! German researchers
at the University of Bonn have discovered how to make individual atoms
ride the light waves in laser beams like a dreadlocked surfer off Piha
beach. As with surfers, the waves can hurl the atoms off into the air with
whatever speed they feel like, or dump them in neat piles on the nanoscale
equivalent of the beach. Unlike the Piha surf, this process is under human
control and predictable, plus there's only room for one surfer per wave.
So Stefan Kuhr can make a row of little atoms (probably going "Cowabunga
dude!") shift from one place to another in neat formation almost as if
they were on a conveyor belt as per the image on the left. Unfortunately
the targeting isn't so good, and the best attempts so far drop the atoms
to the nearest thousandth of a millimetre. Nanotechnology works down on
the millionths of a millimetre scale, so it's a promising start from the
Bonn researchers, but we'll just have to keep waiting for the next little
wave.
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