Hewlett-Packard patents 'atomic pixie dust'
By Peter Henderson
SAN FRANCISCO, July 17 (Reuters) - Hewlett-Packard Co (NYSE:HWP - news) researchers said on Tuesday they had come up with a way to hook up molecular sized computers to the real world using a type of atomic pixie dust, though the solution exists so far only in a concept which has won a new U.S. patent.
Serendipity is key to to the new approach, which accepts that the molecular links will come with flaws, Phil Kuekes, a computer architect at HP Labs, said in a telephone interview.
``It is essentially shake and bake and we don't have any mechanical precision,'' he said. ``When you do things chemically, they don't turn out perfectly, and it turns out it doesn't matter.''
The payoff, aside from the obvious advantage of size, is that molecular computers could be cheap to make, compared with the cost inherent in today's $3 billion semiconductor factories which make microchips that match standards down to microscopic scales. If they didn't the computers wouldn't work.
Kuekes also says that silicon based semiconductors, the brains of current computers, will hit a theoretical wall of improvement in about a decade, while the tiny molecular computers theoretically could be crammed together in invisible spaces and work together on massive problems.
In the new approach, scientists sprinkle their dust and then figure out how it has settled and what gaps have been bridged between molecular wires, Kuekes said. Any missed connections are identified and ignored, so they are not problems.
Kuekes and Stan Williams, a colleague at Palo Alto, California-based Hewlett-Packard Labs, received a patent for the work, which builds on a collaboration between the computer maker and scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles.
MOLECULAR CHIPS
That group had already figured out how to make molecular chips which could store information and crunch data. It aims to make a 16 kilobit molecular memory chip by 2005.
That would hold 16,000 pieces of binary, yes-or-no data, which is not very much compared to current memory standards, but big enough to make hooking up the molecular chip to computer wires a nightmare.
``Once you've built a circuit from molecular-scale devices -- something about the size of a bacterium -- the question is how you get data into and out of it,'' Kuekes said in a statement.
The molecular chips are made out of two layers of ``nanowires'' that are actually crystals 6 to 10 atoms wide and 2 atoms tall. The crystals can be grown in parallel and laid on top of each other to create a grid.
Each intersection of nanowires can contain a molecule that moves when energy passes through the grid, becoming an on-off binary switch needed for computer memory and computation.
The challenge was to connect those sandwiches to the relatively huge wires, 100 times bigger, that are part of today's computers.
The patent is for the concept of throwing atomic dust, based on gold and other molecules, between the ends of nanowires and wires. It also covers a testing process which assigns identities to the connections, making it possible to control them.
The patent covers the idea, but the connections still need to be built, said Kuekes. ``This is a research strategy. We are not claiming we've built one.''
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