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| Thursday, August 24, 2000 | Go to: SMTWTFS |
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| E-mail the story | Plain-text for printing | |
It's an extraordinarily
small world, after all
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| Ten billion gigabytes of data can be stored in this vial, according to Molecular Electronics Corp.'s cofounder, Jim Tour. (Ben DeSoto/Houston Chronicle) |
HOUSTON CHRONICLE
Jim Tour is not the CEO of a hot Silicon Valley computer company, but he knows how to talk like one.
The Rice University professor and cofounder of Molecular Electronics Corp. doesn't hold back when predicting how the technology he and his colleagues are developing will change the face of computing.
"I want to see us run up the tail of every chip maker around," Tour said. "This will change the landscape for some huge, global industries."
That statement is tantamount to throwing down the gauntlet before the Intels and IBMs of the world, but Tour thinks he can back it up. Molecular Electronics' work of developing atom-size computer components is among the most advanced in the country, and might produce working prototypes in the next 12 to 18 months.
It might lead to a computer processor thousands of times faster than today's Pentiums, or memory chips with millions of times more capacity than all the PCs Compaq Computer Corp. builds in a year. Tour said these components will use just a fraction of the electricity today's machines use, and will cost next to nothing to build - on a surface smaller than a dime.
Nanotechnology is a loosely defined area dealing with structures on the scale of a nanometer, which is one-billionth of a meter, or three to four atoms wide. Scientists are learning how to connect atoms and molecules to create nano-scale mechanisms that, in turn, create switches or transistors, or even small machines that can perform complex tasks.
The mechanisms will be extremely small and extremely fast, yet relatively inexpensive to make because they will be built through a chemical process called self-assembly.
Tour's work is relatively well-known to his colleagues in the field, but the formation of Molecular Electronics is a sign that he and Mark Reed, the company's other cofounder and a Yale University physicist, are getting closer to market.
"We're at a point where it's just a technology problem that will be solved by some smart graduate student or myself one of these days," Tour said. "This is not far out. This is going to happen."
Tour and Reed were classmates at Syracuse University in the late 1970s, but did not begin working together until 1991. At a conference, they discovered a common interest in developing nano-scale materials.
The two received a three-year, $1.5 million grant from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency the following year, and landed larger grants in ensuing years. Nanotechnology sounded more like science fiction than science in the early 1990s, even among theoretical physicists and chemists. Dick Smith, director of science and technology forecasts for a Washington-based research firm, Coates & Jarratt Inc., said the field did not get much respect in the past.
"Five years ago, people would laugh at you if you said you believed in that mumbo jumbo," Smith said.
But in 1996, two of Tour's colleagues at Rice, Rick Smalley and Robert Curl, won the Nobel Prize for their discovery of the basic building elements in nanotechnology.
Then earlier this year, the federal government launched a $500 million research initiative into nanotechnology, giving the field another boost toward the mainstream.
The friendlier outlook, coupled with Tour's and Reed's progress, led them to incorporate last fall. With the cooperation of Rice, Yale University and Pennsylvania State University, the company secured rights to much of their university-sponsored research, and is busy filing patent applications.
Molecular Electronics has a dozen or so employees spread out among the three campuses, with plans to move into a new facility near Yale this month.
The headquarters is officially in Chicago, where the recently appointed chief executive, Harvey Plotnick, lives.
Molecular Electronics is not the only company that is commercializing nanotechnology. Technanogy Inc., of Newport Beach, Calif., is developing applications for rocket propulsion and alternative energy sources, while Nanophase Technologies, of Burr Ridge, Ill., is using the technology to improve the performance of sunscreen and eyeglass lenses. These efforts are in areas relatively far afield from Molecular Electronics', however.
The new company's real competition includes projects funded by Hewlett-Packard Co. at the University of California at Los Angeles. That team has developed a molecular switch and a computing architecture that could be used for future nano computer components.
Motorola Inc., Hitachi Ltd. and International Business Machines Corp. have research efforts under way, but their results have not been as widely reported as Molecular Electronics' or those at UCLA.
The only other incorporated business in the field is California Molecular Electronics Corp., a San Jose firm that offers a handful of technologies for license.
"We're all taking slightly different approaches, but they're all roughly parallel," Plotnick said. "But we think ours will win. We think we have most of the best minds out there, but they have some good ones, too."
Molecular Electronics Corp. was the first to hit a number of technology milestones. Tour and Reed were the first to:
Record electrical current through a single molecule.
Demonstrate a molecular switch that can turn on and off.
Demonstrate a molecular form of DRAM, or computer memory, that would actually hold data for 10 minutes after the power was turned off. The silicon DRAMs in today's computers hold data for just a few milliseconds after power is shut down.
The nanotechnology product most likely to be developed for the mass market first is DRAM, said Dan Hutchison, president of VLSI Research Inc., a microchip industry research firm. There is a mass market for the memory devices, which are found in every computer, and they are among the least complex to build.
"If you can pull it off, and make a memory device using nanotechnology, you would blow away anything you could do with hard drive, CD drives, or anything else out there," Hutchison said.
The product will most likely be a combination of existing silicon technology and molecular technology, but it will be a first step toward more complex equipment.
Smith, of Coates & Jarratt, said nanotechnology still has a long way to go before anyone can expect to buy a molecular memory chip at RadioShack, however.
"We don't know yet how we will address, much less solve, the enormous problems of shielding these components from vibration and radiation, programming, communication, etc.," Smith said. "Even after the first assembler is developed, it will require years, perhaps decades, of lab testing before a commercial product could reach the shelves."
Hutchison agreed that much work remained to be done. While the building blocks of a molecular computer are quickly becoming a reality, the techniques for connecting those components and for manufacturing them will be even trickier, he said.
"The chip industry wouldn't be anywhere if it wasn't for the planar process that lets you put multiple pieces on a circuit board," Hutchison said. "Prior to that, the transistor was just a good replacement for vacuum tubes."
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