Molecular Hardware: the Promise and Future of This Technology

Since the first silicon processor chips appeared, the term ” molecular hardware ” has been working on making it a reality. Hardware manufacturers have long been faced with the challenge of putting as many transistors as possible in smaller and smaller spaces , and molecular hardware could be the answer to all your prayers. But why is it still not a reality? In this article we are going to delve into the concept and try to discern the answer.

In 2014, Intel celebrated the launch of the first processors that featured transistors approximately 6,000 times smaller than the diameter of a single hair, yet this was still a long way from making transistors at the molecular level .

On June 17, 2016, a group of researchers from Peking University may have shown that this dream was closer to reality than we thought, and as the race to create increasingly smaller hardware continues, we can also imagine what This will mean for us users, as well as the challenges that manufacturers will have to face to make this technology a reality.

molecular hardware

Molecule-sized hardware

Whenever we think of a molecule, we think of something extraordinarily small, so much so that it can only be seen with a highly specialized team. The problem is that, unlike atoms, molecules don’t always have microscopic dimensions. When someone talks about a transistor made with a single molecule, the first thing we should ask ourselves is: what type of molecule are we talking about?

And it is that a molecular chain can be enormous. Polymers like DNA within every cell in our body can measure between 1.5 and 3 meters when fully stretched, and they are still a molecule. We normally use terms like water molecules as a reference point for size, and these measure approximately 0.275 nanometers in diameter . The thing is, neither DNA nor H2O molecules can properly encompass a proper representation of the size of transistors for a PC processor.

Going back to the Peking University research we mentioned earlier, what we do know is that they managed to make transistors using graphene electrodes (a molecular arrangement of carbon with an atom thick) with methylene groups between them. What they have not said is how large these transistors are, but considering how small the groups of graphene and methylene are, we can get an idea that their size would be close to that of a molecule of water .

Size is not everything when it comes to transistors

Although the most important concept in this technology is to be able to fit as many more transistors in the smallest possible space, reducing the size of these transistors is not the only thing that can be done to achieve this. In addition to making an effective molecular-size transistor that has a significantly higher lifespan (at least a year) than its predecessors (a few hours), the researchers in Beijing also made another breakthrough.

molecular hardware

If today’s transistors are able to communicate by moving electrons, what they have accomplished is that these molecular transistors can communicate with each other by moving photons instead. Photons travel a lot faster than electromagnetic waves (100 times faster, specifically), which means we could cram many more transistors into small spaces and give each of them a speed boost like only Gordon Moore himself could come up with. to dream.

So we are talking that we would not only handle transistors as small as a molecule of water, but they would also be able to communicate 100 times faster than today. If we could translate this into a desktop processor as we know them until now, it would mean that we would have a CPU of the same size but with a much lower consumption and with a performance up to 100 times higher .

So why don’t we have molecular hardware yet?

The problem that researchers have encountered with this technology is the same one that happens whenever we deal with things at the atomic or molecular level: it is unstable . For example, electromagnetic fields have a strong tendency to cause the atomic structures of metals and other conductive materials to change slightly. Such a change can be interpreted as a signal (the ones and zeros of the binary system for example), but these microscopic “grains” of material could also cause the transistors to malfunction .

For now, they have managed to create a transistor (which is nothing more than a switch, remember) that could be turned on and off about 100 times before “dying,” and lasting up to a year. Although this is a wonderful achievement compared to what we currently have, as you will suppose it is not yet a viable thing, especially when the transistors open and close millions of times.

The first real challenge we are facing, then, is to isolate a microelectric environment in such a way that it can function for at least a decade .

But even if they finally did manage to build a viable and durable molecular transistor, we’d be faced with the second challenge : mass-manufacture it. For the foreseeable future, ICs are the gold standard for internal hardware communication, and making this system work with molecular systems is next to impossible.

In other words, the third challenge would be to adapt the rest of the hardware so that it could work in conjunction with a processor with molecular transistors.

The future of this technology

The effort to make molecular hardware is certainly tempting and very promising for the advances that this could bring to humanity (and we are talking much more than a desktop PC processor, of course).

If manufacturers were able to overcome obstacles such as requiring cryogenic temperature to read data, get rid of the connectivity gap between molecules and current electromagnetic circuits, and somehow make their lifespan viable, we could be in for a real revolution. technology that would change the world as we know it .