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To: techreports who wrote (50003)	1/23/2002 10:09:19 PM
From: Dexter Lives On	Respond to of 54805

HP, UCLA Grab Nanotech Patent By Michael Singer Researchers at Hewlett-Packard (NYSE:HWP) and UCLA Wednesday say they have received a U.S. patent for technology that could make it possible to build very complex logic chips at the molecular scale. The process is also known as Nanotechnology. How small is that? Well, one nanometer is about 10 times the diameter of a hydrogen atom. The advances are important because most experts believe that silicon technology will reach its physical and economic limits by about 2012. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued the patent to Philip Kuekes and R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs and James Heath of UCLA. The copyright builds on previous patents and scientific work by the company and university, working under a grant from the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, with matching funds from HP. "All of this work demonstrates that, in the future, programming could replace today's complex, high-precision method of fabricating computer chips," says Kuekes. Previously, HP demonstrated in the laboratory how some rare earth metals naturally form themselves into nanoscopic parallel wires when they react chemically with a silicon substrate. Two sets of facing parallel wires, oriented roughly perpendicular to each other, could then be made into a grid, like a map of Manhattan in New York City with streets running east-west and avenues north-south. In a related experiment, researchers from the collaboration crossed wires the size of those used in today's computer chips and sandwiched them around a one-molecule thick layer of electrically switchable molecules called rotaxanes. Simple logic gates were then created electronically by downloading signals to molecules trapped between the crosswires. "That work demonstrated for the first time that molecules could be used as electronic devices to perform computer logic," says Heath, who serves as a UCLA chemistry professor and director of the California NanoSystems Institute. "Once a basic grid has been assembled, programming could be used to implement a very complex logic design by electronically setting the appropriate configuration switches in the molecular-scale structure," says Kuekes. But while simple logic circuits have been formed in previous experiments, until the most recent patent, a conceptual barrier remained to taking full advantage of the technology and creating practical, more complex chips. "The problem is that on a single large grid all the electrical signals would interfere with each other," says Williams. "It would be like removing all the traffic signals from Manhattan and demanding a minimum speed of 30 mph - the result would be total gridlock. Signal lights, or cut wires, regulate the flow of traffic and make it possible to carry passengers, or information, between any two points on the grid." The solution proposed by the patented invention is to cut the wires into smaller lengths by turning some "intersections" into insulators. "Essentially, you subdivide the city into smaller neighborhoods, with smaller local streets within each neighborhood and larger streets connecting the neighborhoods," says Williams. The insulators are created by "cutter wires," which are chemically distinct from the others. A voltage difference between the cutter wire and the target wire creates the insulator. Controlling these voltages and charges also has been the subject of a previous patent, issued to Williams and Kuekes last year, which provided a method to connect the molecular-scale devices to current technology, whose components are typically about 100 times larger. Generally speaking, this control involves a special demultiplexing technique using a chemical process to connect lithographically formed wires to the nanometer-scale wires. January 23, 2002 siliconvalley.internet.com