Nanocomputer Points the Way to Push Past Moore's Law

 Nanocomptuers  

By using a new bottom-up nanotech approach, researchers have created the first nanocomputer, the nanoFSM. The ultra-small electronic computer systems that push beyond the imminent end of Moore’s Law.

Ateam of scientists and engineers from The MITRE Corporation and Harvard University has taken key steps toward ultra-small electronic computer systems that push beyond the imminent end of Moore's Law, which states that the device density and overall processing power for computers will double every two to three years.

The team designed and assembled, from the bottom up, a functioning, ultra-tiny control computer that is the densest nanoelectronic system ever built.

A technical paper has been published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the research.

The ultra-small, ultra-low-power control processor—termed a nanoelectronic finite-state machine or "nanoFSM"—is smaller than a human nerve cell. It is composed of hundreds of nanowire transistors, each of which is a switch about ten-thousand times thinner than a human hair. The nanowire transistors use very little power because they are "nonvolatile." That is, the switches remember whether they are on or off, even when no power is supplied to them.

In the nanoFSM, these nanoswitches are assembled and organized into circuits on several "tiles." Together, the tiles route small electronic signals around the computer, enabling it to perform calculations and process signals that could be used to control tiny systems, such as nanorobot medical therapeutic devices, other tiny sensors and actuators, or even insect-sized robots.

In the image at the top, an SEM image of the final chip having 204 contact pads on the outer periphery of the chip is shown. The pads match the pins of a probe card that is connected to the researcher's test system. The metal pads and fan-in interconnect lines appear bright in the image. On the right, the SEM image of the inner layout of the fabricated chip as indicated in the dashed box on the left.

Nanocircuit fabrication - Image Source - Yao et al./PNAS

In 2011, the MITRE-Harvard team demonstrated a single such tiny tile capable of performing simple logic operations. In their recent collaboration they combined several tiles on a single chip to produce a first-of-its-kind complex, programmable nanocomputer.

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"It was a challenge to develop a system architecture and nanocircuit designs that would pack the control functions we wanted into such a very tiny system," according to Shamik Das, chief architect of the nanocomputer, who is also principal engineer and group leader of MITRE's Nanosystems Group. "Once we had those designs, though, our Harvard collaborators did a brilliant job innovating to be able to realize them."

Construction of this nanocomputer was made possible by significant advances in processes that assemble with extreme precision dense arrays of the many nanodevices required. These advances also made it possible to manufacture multiple copies of the nanoFSM, using a groundbreaking approach in which, for the first time, complex nanosystems can be economically assembled from the bottom up in close conformity to a preexisting design. Until now, this could be done using the industry's expensive, top-down lithographic manufacturing methods, but not with bottom-up assembly.

For this reason, the nanoFSM and the means by which it was made represent a step toward extending the very economically important five-decade-long trend in miniaturization according to Moore's Law, which has powered the electronics industry. Because of limitations on its conventional lithographic fabrication methods and on conventional transistors, many industry experts have suggested that the Moore's Law trend soon may come to an end. Some assert that this might occur in as little as five years and have negative economic consequences, unless there are innovations in both device and fabrication technologies, such as those demonstrated by the nanoFSM.


SOURCE  MITRE

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