Nanocomputing: When Will It Happen?

Date: Dec 10, 2004

If you're old enough to remember the 1966 movie Fantastic Voyage, you were probably more impressed with a miniaturized Raquel Welch than with the idea of making technical tools small enough to work at the atomic level. Richard Murch discusses why nanotechnology is so appealing, and why we still don't have it.

Nanocomputers have the potential to revolutionize the 21st century in the same way that the transistor and the Internet led to the information age. Increased investments in nanotechnology could lead to breakthroughs such as molecular computers. Billions of very small and very fast (but cheap) computers networked together can fundamentally change the face of modern IT computing in corporations that today are using mighty mainframes and servers. This miniaturization will also spawn a whole series of consumer-based computing products: computer clothes, smart furniture, and access to the Internet that's a thousand times faster than today's fastest technology.

The Potential for Nanotechnology

Contrary to popular belief, the marriage of chemistry, computing, and microscopic engineering known as nanotechnology is not a new phenomenon; scientists have been working on the possibilities for decades. Nanotechnology today is an emerging set of tools, techniques, and unique applications involving the structure and composition of materials on a nanoscale—that is, billionths of a meter. This research has the potential to usher in a golden era of self-replicating machinery and self-assembling consumer goods made from cheap raw atoms. The following list presents just a few of the potential applications of nanotechnology:

Expansion of mass-storage electronics to huge multi-terabit memory capacity, increasing by a thousand fold the memory storage per unit. Recently, IBM's research scientists announced a technique for transforming iron and a dash of platinum into the magnetic equivalent of gold: a nanoparticle that can hold a magnetic charge for as long as 10 years. This breakthrough could radically transform the computer disk-drive industry.
Making materials and products from the bottom up; that is, by building them from individual atoms and molecules. Bottom-up manufacturing should require fewer materials and pollute less.
Developing materials that are 10 times stronger than steel, but a fraction of the weight, for making all kinds of land, sea, air, and space vehicles lighter and more fuel-efficient. Such nanomaterials are already being produced and integrated into products today.
Improving the computing speed and efficiency of transistors and memory chips by factors of millions, making today's chips seem as slow as the dinosaur. Nanocomputers will eventually be very cheap and widespread. Supercomputers will be about the size of a sugar cube.
Using gene and drug delivery to detect diseased cells; nanoagents will target organs in the human body, providing molecular repair and cell surgery.
Removing the finest contaminants from water and air to promote a cleaner environment and potable water.

Many other applications will be recognized or identified over time.

TIP

Despite the concept having been around for a long time, the technical aspects of nanotechnology are new enough to require a specialized vocabulary. See the "Nanoterminology" section at the end of this article for a brief review of some of the words that are already becoming commonplace.

Nanomanufacturing

Electronics have always been fueled by miniaturization. Working smaller has led to tools capable of manipulating individual atoms, like the proteins in a potato manipulate the atoms of soil, air, and water to make copies of the potato. Many worldwide research initiatives are underway to invent and construct devices that can be manufactured at almost no cost by treating atoms discretely, just as computers treat bits of data. This tiny technology would allow automatic construction of consumer goods without traditional labor—in the same way that a copy machine produces unlimited copies without a human retyping the original information. This approach has some profound implications for manufacturing and economic impact for all nations; for example, it could eliminate some manufactured goods. Why go out and buy, when you can replicate what you want at home?

Today's manufacturing methods are very crude at the molecular level. Casting, grinding, milling, and even lithography move atoms in an unsophisticated way. It's like trying to make things out of LEGO blocks with boxing gloves on your hands. Yes, you can push the LEGO blocks into great heaps and pile them up, but you can't really snap them together the way you'd like.

Nanotechnology consists of molecular manufacturing or, more simply, building things one atom or molecule at a time with programmed nanoscopic robot arms (see Figure 1). A nanometer is one billionth of a meter (3–4 atoms wide). That's a thousand million times smaller than a meter. (How big is an atom? If you blew up a baseball to the size of the earth, the atoms would become visible, about the size of grapes.) Now that the principles of nanocomputing have been demonstrated in the lab, vendors, university researchers, and scientists are tackling the formidable task of building machines that work.

Figure 1 In a demonstration, IBM researchers spelled the company name by manipulating individual atoms.

Nanocomputing

A nanocomputer is similar in many respects to the modern personal computer—but on a scale that's very much smaller. With access to several thousand (or millions) of nanocomputers, depending on your needs or requirements—gives a whole new meaning to the expression "unlimited computing"—you may be able to gain a lot more power for less money.

Nanocomputing is evolving along two distinct paths:

New nanoproducts, techniques, and enhancements will be integrated into current technology such as the PC, the mainframe, and servers of all types. Mass storage will change significantly as thousands of cheap storage devices will become available. Storage need never be a problem or cost again.
Research and development are working toward making entirely new nanocomputers that run software—similar to that on today's PC.

We can make a number of statements about nanocomputing that put it into perspective with a healthy dose of reality—and less hype:

Nanocomputing is an emerging technology that is at the early stage of its development.
Worldwide initiatives are in progress to develop the technology. Japan, Europe, and the United States are in a race to the finish line.
Breakthroughs and announcements are increasing with significant rapidity.
Governments are beginning to see the potential and are investing heavily in research and development programs. This interest and investment will accelerate progress.
Nanocomputing shows great potential, but there are significant technical barriers and obstacles to overcome.
The true technology of nanocomputing will not be available for some time. Much development work has to be completed before success can be claimed.
Nanocomputing will come from two sources:

It will be integrated into existing products and technology (disk drives, for example).
Fundamentally new products, software, and architectures will be developed.

More hype will follow due to media exploitation.

Major corporations such as IBM, Intel, Motorola, HP, and others are investing significant amounts of money in research to develop nanocomputers. The market for such devices far surpasses the market for the everyday PC. The new technology may even become known as the personal nanocomputer (PN).

Vendors' current nanotechnology research aims to devise new atomic- and molecular-scale structures and methods for enhancing information technologies, as well as discovering and understand their scientific foundations. Carbon nanotubes and scanning probes derived from the atomic-force microscope show particular promise in enabling dramatically improved circuits and data-storage devices in the near future; we can expect to see significant products in this area in the next 2–5 years.

Barriers to Progress

Despite the hype about nanotechnology in general and nanocomputing in particular, a number of significant barriers must be overcome before any progress can be claimed.

Work is needed in all areas associated with computer hardware and software design:

Nanoarchitectures and infrastructure
Communications protocols between multiple nanocomputers, networks, grids, and the Internet
Data storage, retrieval, and access methods
Operating systems and control mechanisms
Application software and packages
Security, privacy, and accuracy of data
Circuit faults and failure management

Basically, we can divide the obstacles to progress into two distinct areas:

Hardware: the physical composition of a nanocomputer, its architecture, its communications structure, and all the associated peripherals
Software: new software, operating systems, and utilities must be written and developed, enabling very small computers to execute in the normal environment.

Hardware Barriers

A nanocomputer has to be constructed. Very few researchers are even close to achieving this goal. The process of self-replicating and building is nowhere near reality. The fundamental design of a nanocomputer has not even been proposed yet. No one has specified any realistic standards for architecture, CPU speeds/clock speeds, data formats. They simply don't exist in a real form. Work to achieve this goal will take substantial effort and may require from 15–25 years of work.

Software Barriers

Nanosoftware is not in much better shape. No architecture or hardware standards have been designed yet; it's very difficult to design software that will run on a computer that doesn't exist. Will we see Microsoft Windows products on a future nanocomputer? Unlikely. Entirely new operating systems must be designed and built for nanocomputers. Until there is a fundamental design in place with a basic architecture, very little software design can occur.

Summary and Final Thoughts

Intriguing and fascinating as nanocomputing is, it's not going to appear on your desktop anytime soon—it's years away. Evolving technology is notoriously difficult and risky to predict. The big question is whether nanocomputers will be economical to manufacture and sell; they have to be commercially viable to compete with existing personal computers.

If trends continue, we'll have to develop a fundamentally new manufacturing technology to let us inexpensively build computer systems with quantities of logic elements that are molecular in both size and precision, and are interconnected in highly complex architectures. Nanotechnology will let us achieve this goal.

The sales of products incorporating emerging nanotechnology is very bright, expected to rise from less than 0.1% of global manufacturing output today to 15% in 2014, totaling $2.6 trillion. This value will approach the size of the information technology and telecom industries combined, and will be 10 times larger than biotechnology revenues. However, sales of basic nanomaterials such as carbon nanotubes and quantum dots will total only $13 billion by 2014 (source: NanoInvestorNews.com, 10/25/04 report).

In the next one to two decades, we can expect a nanocomputer to be the size of a wallet, and with about the same size and feel. It may come encased in a leather case. Yet it will have enough memory to record every volume in the Library of Congress, and the entire contents of the Internet—several billion times the capacity of the largest PC of today. It will open with a flip, the two-panel screen will light up, and a world of knowledge will be at your fingertips. Nanocomputing's best bet for success today comes from being integrated into existing products, PCs, storage, and networks—and that's exactly what's taking place.

Nanoterminology

This section lists some of the common definitions of fundamental nanotechnologies and applies them to nanomechanical devices and systems, including molecular manufacturing systems and nanocomputers. (For these and other relevant terms and definitions, visit The Foresight Institute, particularly K. Eric Drexler's excellent Nanosystems; Unbounding the Future; and Nanotechnology Now's Glossary.)

Biomolecular machinery. Evolved by nature—such as the bacterial flagellar motor and the actin-myosin system of muscle. Has shown the feasibility of molecular machine systems and may provide prefabricated working components.
Computational chemistry. Enables designers of molecular systems to understand which designs will produce which results, helping synthetic chemists to produce devices that will function properly in systems.
Mechanosynthesis. Mechanically guided chemical synthesis. Fundamental to molecular manufacturing, it guides chemical reactions on an atomic scale by means other than the local effects and electronic properties of the reagents; it is thus distinct from (for example) enzymatic processes and present techniques for organic synthesis.
Molecular machines. Produce controlled motion on a molecular scale. By bringing other molecules together in a controlled way, they will one day be used to control the sequences of chemical reactions that will enable molecular manufacturing of complex nanosystems.
Molecular manufacturing. The construction of objects to complex, atomic specifications using sequences of chemical reactions directed by non-biological molecular machinery. Molecular nanotechnology comprises molecular manufacturing together with its techniques, its products, and their design and analysis; it describes the field as a whole.
Molecular nanotechnology. Thorough, inexpensive control of the structure of matter based on molecules.
Molecular recognition. A chemical term referring to processes in which molecules adhere in a highly specific way, forming a larger structure; an enabling technology for nanotechnology.
Molecular surgery or molecular repair. Analysis and physical correction of molecular structures in the body, using medical nanomachines.
Molecular systems engineering. Design, analysis, and construction of systems of molecular parts working together to carry out a useful purpose.
Molecule. Group of atoms held together by chemical bonds; the typical unit manipulated by nanotechnology.
Nano-. A prefix meaning one billionth (1/1,000,000,000).
Nanocomputer. A computer with parts built on a molecular scale.
Nanodevices. Including sensors, transistors, actuators, and others, will be components first of early products, and later of advanced nanosystems.
Nanoelectronics. A natural extension of the microelectronic technologies of today, expected to be a crucial application of emerging nanotechnologies' molecule-by-molecule control of products and byproducts; the products and processes of molecular manufacturing, including molecular machinery.
Nanoelectronics. Electronics on a nanometer scale, whether made by current techniques or nanotechnology; includes both molecular electronics and nanoscale devices resembling today's semiconductor devices.
Nanomachine. An artificial molecular machine of the sort made by molecular manufacturing.
Nanomanufacturing. See molecular manufacturing.
Nanomaterials. Materials that gain special mechanical, optical, and electronic properties from their nanoscale structure.
Nanostructures. Underlie all nanotechnologies. Their diverse physical, chemical, and electronic properties determine what nanotechnologies can do.
Nanosurgery. A generic term including molecular repair and cell surgery.
Nanotechnology. See molecular nanotechnology.
Nanotubes. Provide strong, stiff building blocks with diverse electronic properties, suiting them for use in a wide range of nanoelectromechanical systems (NEMS).
Positional synthesis. Control of chemical reactions by precisely positioning the reactive molecules; the basic principle of assemblers.
Scanning probe. Instrument that has led the way in imaging and manipulating molecular structures on surfaces.
Sensors. At the nanoscale, can be used to recognize molecules and to probe the properties of surfaces and objects at the atomic scale.