[ODCAD] Nanotube RAM could displace silicon memory
Balls, tubes, sheets ... carbon molecules have more contortions than Cirque du Soleil
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
posted 2:47pm EST Mon May 12 2003 - submitted by J. Eric Smith
NEWS
Who says there's nothing worth watching on the tube these days? Nanotubes, that is. That funky carbon substance known economically as Buckminsterfullerene, a.k.a. "buckyballs," has been twisted and turned into a memory device that may revolutionize computer data storage as we know it.

Researchers at Massachusetts-based Nantero have arranged carbon molecules into tubes with a diameter around a billionth of a meter and only a few hundred nanometers long. By placing a few billion of these on a planar surface and applying an electric current, certain groups of tubes can be made to clump together. What's more, they stay clumped even after current is removed, being held together by Van der Waals forces. By applying a different current later the clumps can be made to separate, meaning that the clumps can function as a nanoscale storage device.

The huge advantage of Nantero's product is in density and speed: nanotubes can be switched from on to off in half a nanosecond, and billions of tubes can exist in a single square millimeter. Comparable silicon-based memory cells require tens of nanoseconds to operate and are currently 100 times the size of a single nanotube. Nanotubes even retain their contents after power is removed, something that conventional RAM does not, meaning that the technology could be used in place of mechanical hard drives.

You can read more about this fascinating development over at The Economist.




ERIC'S OPINION
I've seen the future, and it's really, really tiny. As I've mentioned in past articles, the ability to manipulate matter at molecular and atomic levels is not only going to be advantageous in the near future, it's going to be required to stay competitive. After that, quantum mechanics may offer similarly earthshattering leaps, but I suspect that's a bit further off.

It seems these neat carbon arrangements have become the Swiss Army knife of molecules. Buckyballs are being used to deliver drugs and treatments directly to cancer cells. Nanotubes are considered to be the first material that might make a space elevator possible, even practical. IBM's made transistors out of them.

There seems to be no limit, large or small, to what these little things can do.

[ODCAD] Nano conveyor of Metal

Source: Chemical Eng. News, May 3, 2004

Scientists from Univ. of Californian, Berkeley and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab have found a way to transport molten metal along nanotube.

Physics professor Alex Zettl, postdoc Christ Regan and their coworkers applied electrical current to a multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWNT), and the heat generated can melt contacting metal crystal. The metal then migrate along the tube from the anode to the cathode. The metal particles are shuttled along the surface of the nano tube in atomic form without evaporation. They observed that the metal can move over a greater distance than 2 um.

Potentially, this may be useful technology to make nano circuit or nano device combining metal with nano tube.


Copy right owned by OD Software Incorporated (ODSI)(http://www.odcad.com/)-the expert and toolkit provider of electronic material, device