Aditya Mittal

Writing 105

Disclaimer: This article has nothing to do with the Economist.  It is a mere imitation of their style for a writing class assignment.  The content, however, is written by Aditya Mittal.

 

Science & Technology

Hardware Engineers

Transition to Nanoelectronics

Feb 24th 2007 | SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY
From The Economist print edition

The future of electronics is nano

 

Directions Magazine

 

Apple’s nano iPod has got nothing to do with nanoelectronics or nanotechnology.  Apple’s new iPod nano is impossibly small. Much like the original, small-at-the-time iPod stood out in a crowd of brick-sized hard disk players, the nano is smaller by an order of magnitude than its full-sized cousin.  I want my electronics to be ever-smaller, ever-less obtrusive. I’m not going to be happy until I have an iPod molar™ implanted directly in my jaw. Heck, I’ll take a whole mouthful. Forget whitening gels, nothing would gleam like a full frontal row of shining white plastic chompers with a terabyte or so of embedded flash memory hidden away beneath the gum-line.  This is the perception of MacWorld’s Matthew Honan.

Nano is a hot trend in the technology world that started around 1998.  All kinds of small products that have nothing to do with nanotechnology are attaching the nano word (nano is a small word).  Nano has become analogous to small.  Real nanoelectronics exist in labs at Cornell, Berkeley, IBM, HP, Intel and so forth.  Transistors based on DNA, Superconductors, Carbon Atoms, Optical and Microwave Cavities, and Optical Fiber are some of the real explorations of nanoelectronics.  Nanosoft is registered by Perlin Enterprises.  Nanosoft.net makes software.  Nanorobots are tiny robots. Nano is 10-9.  Apple’s smallest iPod, much smaller than Apple’s nano iPod, is the iPod shuffle.  Even smaller is Samusung’s 0.73 cubic-inch YP-F1Z.  Small is the trend, and nano is the buzz word.

No doubt technology is getting smaller, more compact, less power consumptive, and smarter.  But when are the real nanoelectronics going to be in our products.  Fifteen, maybe, twenty years down the road.  After 3 or 4 generations of Phd. Students have had a chance to truly develop it.  It’s in, it’s being developed, but there just aren’t enough scientists and engineers and funding.  It’s an expensive process.  Buying gold is still cheaper than making gold.  With real nanotechnology we hope to be able to make diamonds from carbon.  After all, diamonds are just really compact formations of carbon atoms.

The transition from CMOS to nano is now

Current electronics are based upon CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor) technology.  This technology has reached size limitations in how small we can make it. It’s time that one of the above mentioned nanoscale technologies takeover to allow us to continue building smaller and more compact devices. Current attempts by IBM and HP are to begin integrating nano components into the present CMOS integrated chips. Currently, we understand how to make individual nanoelectronic components, however, we are unable to integrate them and maintain their functionality.

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.  This was Moore’s law published in “cramming more components onto integrated circuits” in the Electronics Magazine in 1965.  Moore’s law has held steady since, surprising even its inventor Gordon E. Moore, the founder of Intel.  Often, Gordon has expressed doubts in his law, but his law has continued to hold. Recently, he questioned whether his law will continue to hold as CMOS technology comes to its limits.  The answer seems to be that it will hold as we make the switch from CMOS to nanoelectronics.

With the advent of nanoelectronics, in fact, it is speculated by industry experts this rate might increase from double to four times.  If this continues to hold true as it has for the last 40 years, then, we are looking at extremely fast, sturdy and cheap computers in the near future.  It is clear, that the marginal complexity of the transistors is an exponentially growing function and so is the hard drive capacity.  Based off of Moore’s law here we have Hendy’s law, who is an Australian.  Here the graph shows how for digital cameras he expects an exponential graph for pixels per dollar.

Image:Hendys Law.jpg

Hendys_Law.jpg‎ (59KB, MIME type: image/jpeg)

This phenomenon can hold generally true for any electronics, because of the direction the technology is taking.  The complexity of the electronic functions will increase exponentially with time for every given dollar.  While so far the exponential growth rate has been a steady doubling every two years, with the advent of nanoelectronics, some expect this rate to become a quadrupling every two years.  However, Intel’s Gordon Moore does not feel the same.  His opinion can be found on http://news.com.com/Moore+says+nanoelectronics+face+tough+challenges/2100-1006_3-5607422.html. 

 

Currently, scientists and engineers are trying to cross a potential barriers related to cost and time of moving from CMOS technology to nanoelectronics.  Many different attempts are being made in this direction including the DNA computing, Quantum computing, carbon nanotube transistors, integration of Photonics into chips etc.  It is hard to say how quickly and which one of these technologies will become commercially viable.  However, one way or another we are bound to succeed at breaking the barriers currently posed by the physical limitations of CMOS technology, which has served us well for the last few decades.  After all, all the energies are accumulating and will keep accumulating until they allow us to cross this potential barrier.  Probably, in next fifteen or twenty years we can expect to see some real nano devices, unlike the nano iPod.

 

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Macworld’s Mathew Honan’s article was published in Playlist Magazine under the title Nano a Nano: iPod nano versus other micro players. ScientificChess has a nice introductory article to nanotechnology. Cornell’s Center for Nanoscale Systems also has a lot of practical information for nanoelectronics.