On Fri, 14 Jul 2000, David Blenkinsop wrote:
>
> The prospect of "nanotech first" continues to seem plausible to me too,
> even given the fact that we're probably still quite a way from being
> able to nanomanufacture *any* large scale product (be it a nano notebook
> computer, or whatever). For some reason I'm a lot more comfortable with
> 2030 for diamondoid manufacturing of significant "large" (visible to
> humans) products, than I am with 2010. Just conservative, I guess.
I'll simply cite, Science 289:94-97 (July 7, 2000), "Carbon Nanotube-Based
Nonvolatile Random Access Memory for Molecular Computing", T. Rueckes et al.
This is a proposal for a crossbar array of buckytubes that are bistable,
and electrostatically switchable into ON/OFF states, approaching 10^12
elements per cm^2 and operation frequencies in excess of 100 GHz.
Furthermore, they have assembled a prototype device to test their
computer calculations.
You can bet that over the next 10 years there will be many engineers
and grad students that will be slaving away late into the night to figure
out how to manufacture and position those buckytubes reliably...
Robert
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