A MEMORY chip that uses organic molecules to store data is just 3 to 5 years
away, a team of engineers told the AAAS meeting.
Circuits on silicon chips are rapidly becoming so small that quantum effects
are taking over and stopping them working reliably. This has led researchers to
look for alternatives. Making molecules do the job could shrink the building
blocks of chips 100-fold, to just 10 nanometres.
Stanley Williams and Phil Kuekes of Hewlett-Packard Laboratories in Palo
Alto, California, with colleagues at University of California, Los Angeles,
designed their new-style chip around molecules that can be switched from one
state to another with an electric current. The two states could represent the
ones and zeros of digital code.
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To build their device, Williams and Kuekes plan to start by growing a set of
parallel wires made from a mixture of erbium and silicon, each about 10 atoms
wide. They will then add molecules that are specially tailored so that one end
grabs the wires.
Then they will lay down another set of wires perpendicular to the first set
and isolated from them by insulators. The other ends of the molecules will be
designed to latch onto this second set of wires.
Each molecule ends up bridging a pair of wires, one from each set
(see Diagram).
Current can then be passed through individual molecules by applying a
voltage between the appropriate pair of perpendicular wires. The benefit of this
structure is that faulty molecules can be bypassed.
