Nanoscale wires defy quantum predictions, giving a new lease of life to Moore's law.

[bananas]

http://www.nature.com/news/nanoscale-wires-defy-quantum-predictions-1.9747

Nature | News

Nanoscale wires defy quantum predictions

Atomic electrical components conduct just like conventional wires, giving a new lease of life to Moore's law.

Edwin Cartlidge
05 January 2012

Microchips could keep on getting smaller and more powerful for years to come. Research shows that wires just a few nanometres wide conduct electricity in the same way as the much larger components of existing devices, rather than being adversely affected by quantum mechanics.

As manufacturing technology improves and costs fall, the number of transistors that can be squeezed onto an integrated circuit roughly doubles every two years. This trend, known as Moore's law, was first observed in the 1960s by Gordon Moore, the co-founder of chip manufacturer Intel, based in Santa Clara, California. But transistors have now become so small that scientists have predicted that it may not be long before their performance is compromised by unpredictable quantum effects.

<snip>

David Ferry, an electrical engineer at Arizona State University in Tempe, points out that key parts of Intel’s latest generation of microchips are just 22 nanometres long — only about 100 times the size of the spacing between atoms in a silicon wafer. “The question is, how much further can they go?” asks Ferry.

Potentially quite a lot further, according to a study published today in Science1. Michelle Simmons, a physicist and director of the Centre for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, and her colleagues made atomic-scale wires by covering a silicon crystal with a layer of hydrogen atoms and then carving out several-nanometre-wide channels in the hydrogen using the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope. They absorbed phosphorous atoms onto the exposed silicon and after heating covered the whole thing with crystalline silicon, creating wires of phosphorous-doped silicon in which the phosphorous provided the extra electrons needed to generate a current.

<snip>

[ProdigalJunkMail]

1. cool article! thanks n/t

[Corruption Winz]

2. Technology is pretty amazing when descibed in this fashion.

It's almost sad that all we can seem to do with it lately is shell out more computers. Still, very impressive.

[Confusious]

5. There's a lot more going on

http://www.sciencedaily.com/articles/matter_energy/materials_science/

I posted that piece since I happen to have an interest in materials science.

Computers are just what the common person can see. Kind of like the electrification of the United States at the turn of the previous century (1899-1900), or the car culture of the middle.

Besides, faster computers are important. We're getting to the point where, if we had to do the science by hand, you wouldn't be expecting advances in the next 100 years, if not more.

http://www.boeing.com/commercial/777family/background/back5.html

http://www.boeing.com/news/releases/2003/q2/nr_030612g.html

Most of the time, you really don't need some of the stuff they come up with. What do you need composite materials for? If they replaced the frame of your car with a composite material would you even notice? Most people wouldn't.

[Corruption Winz]

7. I get what you're saying..

Poor wording on my part. What I should have said is that it's a shame people only seem to care about the newest unimportant gadget. There's obviously a lot more going on.

[Fumesucker]

3. Matrioshka hypernode here we come..

http://www.orionsarm.com/eg-article/484737879bb05

[The Doctor.]

4. It's already been done.

We're way past the Omega nodes and sitting at the lower energy echelons.

There are only two things none of us know:

1) Whether the reuptake optimization has/is going to work/working,

-and-

2) Everything I just said.

[DetlefK]

6. There IS a limit, how small circuits can be. (see bottom of article)

The wave-functions of the atoms are the limiting size. You can create a circuit with the precision of a single atom (-> molecular electronics), but if you squeeze the wires etc. too close to each other, you get quantum interactions and the circuit no longer behaves like a macroscopic circuit.

And such small circuits could only be stored/operated in cryo-environments. Otherwise the circuit would just vanish after some time due to thermic self-diffusion.

[4dog]

8. That's phosphorus, BTW.

Phosphorous is an adjective.