LISTEN To This Issue.

Quote of the Week.

Order From Disorder -- Tales of the Tiny...

CPU Update.

I Sing The Body Electric.

About "The Harrow Technology Report"

LISTEN To This Issue.

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Quote of the Week.

 

"Most man-made materials come from heating, grinding and crushing.  But scientists can instill them with remarkable properties by building them atom-by-atom."

"Nanomaterials have many advantages. Where conventionally produced materials tend to be gross and irregular in composition, with many flaws, nanomaterials approach an elegant perfection. By defining the structure of a substance on such a small scale, scientists can create satisfyingly regular and even flawless shapes."

Fiona Harvey
Aug. 7, FT.com
http://globalarchive.ft.com/globalarchive/articles.html?id=010807001141
(Brought to our attention by reader Dana Hoggatt.)

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Order From Disorder -- Tales of the Tiny...

 

If you look at a photomicrograph of an integrated circuit, your first impression might be of "order."  Row upon row, layer upon layer of incredibly tiny but oh-so-carefully laid out structures:



In fact, they bear more than a casual resemblance to an aerial photograph of Los Angeles at night: 



This ever-smaller "order" is what Moore's Law has wrought -- the scale of the "things" that men and women can now build is shrinking from cities, to circuit boards, to chips.  We've gone from building block-sized buildings hundreds of meters wide, to tiny on-chip structures that are measured in millionths of a meter.  But it's HARD to create the perfectly-ordered structures for our chips at an increasingly tiny scale.  However, if new work from HP Labs comes to fruition, that "order" may be less important; indeed, "chaos theory" may help our chips to revel in the natural state of disorder!

Brought to our attention by reader Vernon Sulway, a new patent from HP is paving the way towards convincing the very molecules of things to become the computing and storage elements of our future!  Essentially, the researches have convinced molecules to form a series of "streets and avenues" all on their own.  The problem, though, is that the resulting pattern is so small that they can't determine what connects to what!  So how could this be useful?

Instead of becoming ever-more "anal" to try to force order on tiny structures the old fashioned way, HP has come up with a way to actually encourage the interconnections to happen at random, and to then use powerful algorithms to figure out what happened -- to build a map of what connect to what, and then make use of the result!   Which is rather the antithesis of the way things have always been...  (http://www.ept.ca/docs/index.php?PageName=article&ArticleID=16337&ShowMode=long) 

 

For Those Who Prefer Order...

But although HP's work is about harnessing disorder, attempts to impose "order" through "self-assembly" continues, at places such as Sandia National Labs.  Reader Kenneth Lacrosse points us to an increasingly important difference between how things work at the "macro" level we're used to, versus the counterintuitive ways that things work when we're dealing with structures billionths of a meter long:  In this particular case, scientists were able to convince lead atoms, deposited over a copper base, to self-assemble themselves into tiny, regular dots and stripes.  And "...there are many control knobs we can turn to create new patterns," according to Sandia's Norm Bartelt. (http://www.sandia.gov/media/NewsRel/NR2001/dotbar.htm)

 

Six-In-One.

Another approach to helping Moore's Law punch through the physical limitations that some say will cause it to grind to a halt in a decade or so, capitalizes on the inherent order of crystalline structures; specifically a class of crystals known as "perovskites."  Brought to our attention by reader Victor Panlilio, these are 3D "Jack of all trades" atomic arrays that can be tweaked to act as insulators, semiconductors, or superconductors.  And they may pave the way to pushing past one of Moore's Law's potential stumbling blocks -- that the "gate insulators" within our on-chip transistors are already approaching three atoms thick, which seems to be the minimum thickness at which they can control electrons.  Perovskites may provide much thinner effective insulators, which could allow our transistors to continue to shrink.

Learning to work with these crystals could yield even more interesting benefits.  As described in the Aug. 6 MSNBC (http://www.msnbc.com/news/614578.asp?0si=-&cp1=1), IBM Nobel Prize winner Georg Bednors and his team have demonstrated that they can turn tiny perovskite crystals into non-volatile memory cells.  Which is certainly useful.  But that's only the beginning of this story -- because each perovskite memory cell can assume one of six stable states, rather than just two ('one' or 'zero') as in conventional digital memory cells!  Much more memory in the same physical space...

 

NOT!

Victor also points out another tiny but significant bit of research.  You might recall from a previous discussion that the accidentally-discovered carbon nanotubes can be turned into semiconductors, opening the way towards a revolutionarily smaller transistor.  Now, according to the Aug. 26 Reuters (http://biz.yahoo.com/rf/010826/n26155710.html), IBM has created a simple but complete logic circuit, a "NOT" gate (which inverts a signal from zero to one, or vice versa) out of a -single- carbon nanotube molecule!

The magic here is the proof that we CAN create a complete single-molecule logic gate (which is essentially several transistors working together in a specific way).  And now that we have one such logic gate, the other logic building blocks that form our CPUs (such as AND and OR gates) are sure to follow, even though commercial results may take a decade.  That may seem a long way off, but IBM's Phaedon Avouris explains why this is so important:

"Carbon nanotubes are now the top candidate to replace silicon when current chip features just can't be made any smaller.  Such beyond-silicon nanotube electronics may then lead to unimagined progress in computing miniaturization and power."

By the way, in case you'd like to try this at home, the recipe seems simple:

Drape one 8-atom wide nanotube over three gold electrodes on a silicon substrate.  Deposit a layer of plastic between two electrodes, and then add a pinch of potassium atoms on top, to taste.  The result?  One very tasty, very small, molecular logic gate!  (Of course, the execution of the recipe might take a bit of practice...)

If you're wondering just how much of a difference this line of research could make if it proves successful, it's expected that we could fit 10,000 carbon nanotube transistors into the space needed for one transistor today!  And won't that change a lot of rules...  (http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/27/technology/27NANO.html?ex=
999918373&ei=1&en=514ed1de19934164)

 

The Wavy Gray Line.

Modern computing has been driven by silicon.  People and other living things, though, have been driven by carbon (remember the phrase "Carbon-based life forms"?).  But as we've just seen, carbon, in the form of carbon nanotubes, now seems likely to edge into computing.  Could the previously clear line between non-living computers and living things be getting less clear?  Consider this picture in the Sept. 4 Nature:

The posts in this nicely-ordered ring are similar to the microscopic structures we build into our computer chips.  But in stark contrast to our ordered silicon world, the blob in the center of this silicon corral is a snail neuron.  The tendrils growing beyond the corral interconnect this neuron with others, and with the silicon chip on which they sit.  But this isn't just an example of microscopic still-life -- a stimulator circuit buried in the silicon beneath the neuron can "tickle" it.  The neuron then passes the signal through other connected neurons, finally routing it into a sensor elsewhere in the chip, where the signal flips a logic switch!  (http://www.nature.com/nsu/010830/010830-7.html)

Although this is a crude first step, it is a "proof of principal" of the melding of computing and living things. (And it's going to get a lot more interesting -- a 15,000 neuron chip is in the works - http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5195-2001Aug27.html). 

This melding of things living, and not, holds enormous promise.  Oh, don't worry (at least not yet) -- we're not talking about turning people into the half-human, half-machine Borg.  But imagine how such "combo chips" might benefit medical and pharmaceutical research, or how they might, eventually, be able to act as a "splice" for a damaged spinal cord! The possibilities are endless  -- and we're just beginning to understand where the potentials lie.  

Of course, melding our silicon expertise with nature's way of doing things will likely push "computing" in directions that are currently far beyond our dreams -- just as pocket calculators were unimaginable in the 1960s.  But hey -- did you really think we'd let Moore's Law run out of steam?

 

Our Atomic Tinker Toy Future!

If even some of these various nano-sized initiatives succeed, or if some of the other research initiatives into molecular, atomic-level, and neuro-computing eventually do allow us to capitalize on the very atoms and molecules that make up the things around us, our world will become a very different place -- which would be a FAR more wrenching change than the switch from vacuum tubes to integrated circuits.  And we all know what THAT shift has wrought...

 

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CPU Update.

 

The revolutionary nanoscale investigations we've just explored do promise to turn our comfortable Moore's Law world of "merely" doubling price performance every 18 months, on its ear.  But there are still many "evolutionary" changes left in our old technology as Moore's Law continues its three-and-a-half decade reign.  For example, eighteen months after Intel introduced its 1 gigahertz CPU, they're now shipping a commodity 2 gigahertz CPU at about the same price!  And Intel has recently demonstrated a 3.5 gigahertz sample of chips yet to come!  (http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,59825,tk,dn082801X,00.asp and http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2808629,00.html).

But suppose you could run a chip 35-times faster than the 2 gigahertz of today?  Would that open up new opportunities?  As improbable as such a revolutionary change sounds, Motorola had just developed a way to merge cheap and easily worked silicon, with more expensive but much faster materials such as gallium arsenide.  One result may be chips fast enough to take on some of the radio communications tasks in cell phones and communicating computing appliances, which currently require special external components.  (Could that lead to a one-chip communicating PDA?)  Also, this new combination chip promises some interesting optical properties, which may eventually mean very fast chips that integrate optical components right on-chip, reducing complexity and speeding things up by reducing the distance between components.

Motorola's chief technology officer, Dennis Roberson, is suggesting that, "What we've fundamentally done is change the whole foundation of the hi-tech industry." 

Of course, Dennis has a vested interest in this, but Cahners In-Stat Group director and principal semiconductor research analyst Steve Cullen muses that,

"They're on to something big...  The long-term potential for this thing is being able to bring the computing power of silicon and the communications capability of gallium arsenide together." (http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/story.jsp?story=92371)

"This could go down in history as a major turning point for the semiconductor industry.  [It] could obsolete current conventional wisdom that some products will always require at least two chips. Placing all components on the same chip also offers performance enhancements, by eliminating the speed loss and power consumption that results from driving signals from chip to chip." (http://news.cnet.com/news/0-1003-200-7053196.html)

Motorola expects these chips to hit the market in 2003.  And that could change a lot of rules.

So, at the revolutionary nanoscale, as well as at the larger evolutionary scales that we're more comfortable with, Things Are Happening.  And these things may make the once inconceivable Moore's Law seem quaint and comfortable, indeed.

Don't blink!

 

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I Sing The Body Electric.

 

We're used to fashion driving technology -- consider the watch market, or why some people choose a particular cell phone, or purchase colored faceplates to have their cell phone match their outfit of the day.  But now we find that technology is rather directly driving fashion! (http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/wireless/2001-07-16-smart-pants.htm)

The "Dockers Mobile Pant," comes with seven pockets specifically designed to meet the needs of people carrying PDAs, cell phones, airline tickets, and the like, and these new pockets are designed for FAST access, letting you unzip and get that ringing cell phone to your ear in well under one second! 

I saw a pair of these in a local store, and I must admit to being impressed at how cleverly all the zippers and flaps are hidden.  (Of course, that's before a few pounds of electronics were dumped inside.)

At $52, these pants are priced similar to their Industrial Age, Version 1 predecessors. 

Technology driving fashion.  And this is just the beginning -- just wait until the active devices are woven directly INTO the clothes!

But I do have to wonder -- if I get a hole in these pants, can I repair them by downloading a "patch" over the Internet...?

 

About "The Harrow Technology Report"