By Dan Jones
Hewlett-Packard Co’s new molecular chip technology is likely to find its way into storage and medical applications before it finds its way into more traditional computing fields, according to one of the researchers who worked on the project. Silicon- based chip designs are expected to reach the end of their lifespan in around ten years time, and HP, along with others in the chip industry have been looking for a successor. Phil Kuekes, a HP physicist, says that molecular chips are a viable alternative to silicon but stresses that production chips based on his research are more than a decade away.
What the HP team has done so far is to develop simple gates based on its molecular research. The gates are built of a layer of synthetic material, called rotaxane, one molecule thick. So far, the team has developed very basic ‘and’ (A+B=C) and ‘or’ (A or B=C) gates, the building blocks of logic design. However, Kuekes says that he is confident that these simple gates can be scaled up.
Kuekes thinks that the technology will first be used in the storage industry as a very high-density storage material. However, one of the intriguing uses he highlights is the medical sphere. Simple chips, smaller than bacteria, could be used as diagnostic tools in the bloodstream, he explained. The chips would have individual molecular sensors instead of pins and run a series of calculations to determine what a virus or bacterium was.
The advent of molecular chips, Kuekes says, will signal a shift in the silicon chip industry, but not its demise. The IC technology will not go away, he said, claiming that silicon will instead act as a conductive layer for the molecular chips. Kuekes explains that the molecular chips will be so small that the only thing they can be wired to be a very high performance silicon substrate. And despite the project’s success so far, Kuekes admits that there is a lot of work to be done before molecular chips become commonplace. Long term, maybe all chips will be built this way, he said.
