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- WASHINGTON (Reuters) ---
Computer experts said Thursday they had taken a big step toward making
tiny super-fast computers known as molecular computers.
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- Built on a crystalline structure, such computers will
someday replace those based on silicon chips and could ultimately make
it possible to have a computer so small it could be woven into clothing,
they predicted.
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- They will need far less power than current computers
and may be able to hold vast amounts of data permanently, doing away with
the need to erase files, and perhaps also be immune to computer viruses,
crashes, and other glitches.
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- "You can potentially do approximately 100 billion
times better than a current Pentium (chip) in terms of energy required
to do a calculation," James Heath, a chemistry professor at the University
of California Los Angeles (UCLA), said in a statement.
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- "We can potentially get the computational power
of 100 workstations on the size of a grain of sand."
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- The team at UCLA and at Hewlett-Packard created a molecular
"logic gate" which forms the basis of how a computer works.
"We have actually built the very simplest gates used in computers
-- logic gates -- and they work," Phil Kuekes, a computer architect
at Hewlett-Packard in Palo Alto, said in a telephone interview.
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- Logic gates switch between "on" and "off"
positions, creating the changes in electrical voltage that represent "bits"
of information.
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- Heath's team did this by creating a new compound, called
rotaxane, which grows in a crystalline structure.
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- Writing in the journal Science, Heath's and Kuekes' teams
said the rotaxane molecules, sandwiched between metal electrodes, functioned
as logic gates.
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- Computers are now based on silicon chips. The information
they carry is etched onto them and it is becoming harder and harder to
do this precisely on ever-smaller chips.
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- But a crystal can absorb information, in the form of
an electrical charge, and organize it more efficiently.
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- The "chips" made using this molecular technology
could be as small as a grain of dust, Kuekes said. "When you walk
into a room, it will turn the TV to your favorite channel. Or instead
of getting carpal tunnel syndrome pushing a mouse around, your finger becomes
the mouse," he said.
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- The next step will be structuring the chip. Instead
of etching this structure onto the surface, as is done now with silicon
chips, it will be downloaded electrically.
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- "We can download all the complexity, by wire, attached
to a bigger computer," Kuekes said.
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- But currently available wires are too big -- much bigger
than the rotaxane molecules -- to do this. "So the next step is going
to be to shrink the wires until they are the same diameter as the molecules,
and then we will have the miniaturized technology," he said.
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- It might be possible to use carbon nanotubes -- long
thin tubes made of pure carbon. Also known as "Bucky tubes",
they are no thicker than most molecules.
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- Last year the same team announced they had made the largest
"defect tolerant" computer ever and named it the Teramac.
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- Shares of Hewlett-Packard surged Thursday $4.56 to close
at $113 in composite U.S. stock market trading, even as rival computer
makers saw share price declines.
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