Wires, switches, and wiring. A route toward a chemically assembled
electronic nanocomputer
James R. Heath
Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, UCLA, 405
Hilgard Ave., Los Angeles, CA 90095-1569 USA
Abstract: A Boolean logic, nonreversible computing machine should,
in principle, be capable of 10 18 bit operations per second at a power
consumption of 1 W. In order to build such a machine that can even approach
this benchmark for efficiency, the development of a robust quantum-state
switch capable of ambient operation, as well as a bottom�up manufacturing
technology, will be necessary. My group, in collaboration with Hewlett
Packard, has developed much of the architecture for such a machine,
which we call a chemically assembled electronic nanocomputer (CAEN).
More recently, in a collaborative effort with Fraser Stoddart�s group
at UCLA, we have begun to build it. The fundamental unit of the machine
is a field-programmable molecular switch, and the fundamental architecture
is a hierarchical organization of wire/switch lattices called crossbars.
Electronically, singly configurable molecular-based switch devices based
on rotaxane molecular compounds have been fabricated in high yield.
These switches were used to construct simple molecular-based logic structures
and read-only memory elements.
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