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MOLETRONICS-“an invisible technology”

ABSTRACT

As a scientific pursuit, the search for a viable successor to silicon computer

technology has garnered considerable curiosity in the last decade. The latest idea, and one
of the most intriguing, is known as molecular computers, or moletronics, in which single
molecules serve as switches, "quantum wires" a few atoms thick serve as wiring, and the
hardware is synthesized chemically from the bottom up.
The central thesis of moletronics is that almost any chemically stable structure that is
not specifically disallowed by the laws of physics can in fact be built. The possibility of
building things atom by atom was first introduced by Richard Feynman in 1959.
An "assembler", which is little more than a submicroscopic robotic arm can be built
and be controlled. We can use it to secure and position compounds in order to direct the
precise location at which chemical reactions occur. This general approach allows the
construction of large, atomically precise objects by initiating a sequence of controlled
chemical reactions. In order for this to function as we wish, each assembler requires a
process for receiving and executing the instruction set that will dictate its actions. In time,
molecular machines might even have onboard, high speed RAM and slower but more
permanent storage. They would have communications capability and power supply.
. Moletronics is expected to touch almost every aspect of our lives, right down to the
water we drink and the air we breathe. Experimental work has already resulted in the
production of molecular tweezers, a carbon nanotube transistor, and logic gates.
Theoretical work is progressing as well. James M. Tour of Rice University is working on
the construction of a molecular computer. Researchers at Zyvex have proposed an
Exponential Assembly Process that might improve the creation of assemblers and
products, before they are even simulated in the lab. We have even seen researchers create
an artificial muscle using nanotubes, which may have medical applications in the nearer
term.
Teramac computer has the capacity to perform 1012 operations in one seconds but it
has 220,000 hardware defects and still has performed some tasks 100 times faster than
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single-processor .The defect-tolerant computer architecture and its implications for

moletronics is the latest in this technology. So the very fact that this machine worked
suggested that we ought to take some time and learn about it.
Such a 'defect-tolerant' architecture through moletronics could bridge the gap
between the current generation of microchips and the next generation of molecular-scale
computers.
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The Architecture of a Moletronics

Computer

Introduction
Recently, there have been some significant advances in the fabrication and demonstration
of individual molecular electronic wires and diode switches. Some novel designs for
several such simple molecular electronic digital logic circuits: a complete set of three
fundamental logic gates: (AND, OR, and XOR gates), plus and adder function built up
from the gates via the well-known combinational logic, was demonstrated. This means in
coming future, this technology could be a replacement for VLSI. However, currently, this
technology is only available under lab condition. How to mass product moletronic chips
is still a big problem.
Currently, integrated circuits by etching silicon wafers using beam of light. It's the VLSI
lithography-based technology makes mass production of Pentium III processor possible.
But as the size of logic block goes to nano-scale, this technology no long available. As
wavelength get too short, they tend to become X-rays and can damage the micro structure
of molecules. On the other hand, the mask of lithography of Pentium III is so complex,
and the shape and the dimension of its logic block varies so much. Looking at currently
available integrated circuits, the transistor density of memory chip are much higher than
processor chip, the reason is that the cell of memory is much more simple than circuit of
processor. Because, except the decoding logic, most of the memory bit cell is the same.
Could we find a way to fabricate complex logic circuit as Pentium processor using
million of same logic units? The PLD(Programmable Logic Devices) is the answer. The
paper is organized as following: section II presents some basic of moletronic gate circuit.
section III uses PLD technology to build more complex blocks. section IV shows the
nanotube can be used for interconnection wires.
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Moletronic circuit--QCA basics

We discuss an approach to computing with quantum dots, Quantum-dot Cellular
Automata (QCA), which is based on encoding binary information in the charge
configuration of quantum-dot cells. The interaction between cells is Coulombic, and
provides the necessary computing power. No current flows between cells and no power
or information is delivered to individual internal cells. Local interconnections between
cells are provided by the physics of cell-cell interaction. The links below describes the
QCA cell and the process of building up useful computational elements from it. The
discussion is mostly qualitative and based on the intuitively clear behavior of electrons in
the cell.

Fundamental Aspects of QCA

A QCA cell consists of 4 quantum dots positioned at the vertices of a square and contains
2 extra electrons. The configuration of these electrons is used to encode binary
information. The 2 electrons sitting on diagonal sites of the square from left to right and
right to left are used to represent the binary "1" and "0" states respectively. For an
isolated cell these 2 states will have the same energy. However for an array of cells, the
state of each cell is determined by its interaction with neighboring cells through the
Coulomb interaction. A schematic diagram of a four-dot QCA cell is shown in Fig. 1.

Figure: Schematic of the geometry of the basic four-

site cell.The tunneling energy between two neighboring
sites is designated by t, while a is the near-neighbor
distance.
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If the barriers between cells are sufficiently high, the electrons will be well localized on
individual dots. The Coulomb repulsion between the electrons will tend to make them
occupy antipodal sites in the square a shown in Fig. 2. For an isolated cell there are two
energetically equivalent arrangements of the extra electrons which we denote as a cell
polarization P = +1 and P = -1. The term "cell polarization" refers only to this
arrangement of charge and does not imply a dipole moment for the cell. The cell
polarization is used to encode binary information - P = +1 represents a binary 1 and P =
-1 represents a binary 0.

Figure: Coulombic repulsion causes the electrons to

occupy antipodal sites within the cell. These two
bistable states result in cell polarizations of P = +1 and
P = -1.
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The two polarization states of the cell will not be energetically equivalent if other cells
are nearby. Consider two cells close to one another as shown in the inset of Fig. 3. The
figure inset illustrates the case when cell 2 has a polarization of +1. It is clear that in that
case the ground-state configuration of cell 1 is also a +1 polarization. Similarly if cell 2 is
in the P = -1 state, the ground state of cell 1 will match it. The figure shows the nonlinear
response of the cell-cell interaction.

Figure: The cell-cell response

A Majority Gate

Fig. 4 shows the fundamental QCA logical device, a three-input majority gate, from
which more complex circuits can be built. The central cell, labeled the device cell, has
three fixed inputs, labeled A, B, and C. The device cell has its lowest energy state if it
assumes the polarization of the majority of the three input cells. The output can be
connected to other wires from the output cell. The difference between input and outputs
cells in this device, and in QCA arrays in general, is simply that inputs are fixed and
outputs are free to change. The inputs to a particular device can come from previous
calculations or be directly fed in from array edges. The schematic symbol used to
represent such a gate is also shown in Fig. 4. It is possible to "reduce" a majority logic
gate by fixing one of its three inputs in the 1 or 0 state. If the fixed input is in the 1 state,
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the OR function is performed on the other two inputs. If it is fixed in the 0 state, the AND
function is performed on the other two inputs. In this way, a reduced majority logic gate
can also serve as a programmable AND/OR gate. Combined with the inverter shown
above, this AND/OR functionality ensures that QCA devices provide logical
completeness

Figure: The Majority Gate

Programmable Logic Devices and Field

Programmable Gate Array basics
The Programmable Logic Devices(PLD) are nothing new, they have been around for
almost 20 years. Since PLD device exists, it makes the life of a lot of Electronic
designer's life easy. It is well known that in order to design a digital system, besides
microprocessors and peripheral ICs there are needed several other devices, such as lots of
logic gates to glue these chips together. This circuits make our life and our printed boards
very hard and complex. It exists a way to dramatically improve this way of design digital
devices that, although it is not completely different from the others, brings the desired
results more efficiently: in a shorter time and with fewer expenses. The way
abovementioned is Programmable logic devices (PLD), they permit the customizing of
one or more logic functions on a chip in contrast to the designer being restricted to
defining a logic function with specific chips. The programmability aspect permits the
logic designer to spend more time on the development and validation of high level
functionality. The simplest Integrated circuit of the PLD is PAL/GAL.
PAL(Programmable Array Device), which was invented at Monolithic Memories in 1978
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PAL consists of an AND array followed by an OR array, either (or both) of which is
programmable. Inputs are fed into the AND array, which performs the desired AND
functions and generates product terms. The products terms are then fed into the OR array.
In OR array, the output of various product terms are combined to produced the desired
output. With PAL, we can implement any combinational logic circuit. How about the
sequential logic circuits? There exists another kind of customized IC: Field
Programmable Gate Array. See Fig. 7.

Figure: The Architecture of Field Programmable

Gate Array, a combination of PLD and Masked
Programmed Gate Array(MPGA).

Unlike the traditional fully customised VLSI circuits, Field Programmable Gate
Array(FPGAs) represent a technical breakthrough in the corresponding industry. Before
they were introduced, an electronic designer had only a few options for implementing
digital logic. These options included discrete logic devices (VLSI or SSI); programmable
devices (PALs or PLDs); and Masked Programmed Gate Arrays(MPGA) or Cell-Based
ASICs. A discrete device can be used to implement a small amount of logic. A
programmable device is a general-purpose device capable of implementing the logic of
tens or hundreds of discrete devices. It is programmed by users at their site using
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programming hardware. The size of a PLD is limited by the power consumption and time
delay. In order to implement designs with thousands or tens of thousands of gates on a
single IC, MPGA can be used. An MPGA consists of a base of pre-designed transistors
with customised wiring for each design. The wiring is built during the manufacturing
process, so each design requires custom masks for the wiring. The cost of mask-making
is expensive and the turnarround time is long (typically four to six weeks). The
availability of FPGAs offer the benefits of both PLD and MPGA. FPGAs can implement
thousand of gates of logic in a single IC and it can be programmed by users at their site in
a few seconds or less depending on the type device used. The risk is low and the
development time is short. These advantages have made FPGAs very popular for
prototype development, custom computing, digital signal processing, and logic
emulation. From the architecture of PLD and FPGA, we could see repeated logic cell.
Thus, density of this kind of chip increased very quickly. Just a few years ago, a high-
density FPGA consisted of 50K gates and was used for glue logic. Today's FPGA are
multi-million system gate devices at the heart of electronic systems in some of the fastest
growing high-tech markets. There is a lot of computer around the world using FPGA
processors.

interconnection: nanotube
Today, one way to pack transistors more densely on a chip is to make the already
microscopic wires smaller and thinner. But the wires are approaching the thickness of a
few hundred atoms. Once wires get down to only several atoms thick, says IBM
researcher Phaedon Avouris, they blow up when you try to send electrical signals through
them. Nanotubes don't. IBM and others are racing to use nanotubes to make the first
carbon chips, perhaps the successor to silicon chips, though the program is only in the
earliest stages. A carbon nanotube is a tubular form of carbon with a diameter as smaller
as 1 nm. The length can be from a few nanometers to several microns. (1 micron is equal
to 1,000 nanometers.) It is made of only carbo atoms. To understand the CNT's structure,
it helps to imagine folding a two-dimensional graphene sheet. Depending on the
dimensions of he sheet and how it is folded, several variations of nanotubes can arise.
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Also, just like the singel or the multilayer nature of graphene sheets, the resulting tubes
may be a single- or a multiwall type. The tube's orientation is denoted by a roll-up

vector(See Fig.8) . Along this vector, the graphene sheet is rolled into a
tubular from. The and are vectors defining a unit cell in the planer graphene sheet. n
and m are integers, and is the angle. A variety of tubes-based on the orientations of the
benzyne rings on the graphene tube-are possible. If the orientation is parallel to the tube
axis, then the resulting "zigzag" tubes are semiconductors. When the orientation is
perpendicular to the tube axis, the corresponding "arm chair" tubes are metallic. In
between the two extremes, when (n-m)/3 is an integer, the nanotubes are semimetallic.
The two key parameters, the diameter d and the chiral angle , are related to (n,m) by

,. For example, a(10,10) nanotube is 1.35 nm in diameter

whereas a (10,10) tube is 0.78nm in diameter. Carbon nanotubes exhibit extraordinary
mechanical properties as will. For example, the Young's modulus is typically over 1 Tera
Pascal. Also, the nanotube along the axis is as stiff as a diamond. The estimated tensile
strength is about 200 Gpa, which is an order of magnitude higher than that of any other
material. Here we are mainly interested in carbon nanotube's electronic behavior and
applications. The metallic and semiconducting nature described previously has given rise
to the possibilities of metal-semiconductor or semiconductor junctions. These junctions
may form nanoelectronic devices based entirely on single atomic species such as carbon.

Figure: Carbon nanotubes: their structure, properties

and uses in nano-electronic devices
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Fault tolerance: TeraMac

Teramac is a massively parallel experimental computer built at Hewlett-Packard
Laboratories to investigate a wide range of different computational architectures. It is a
true supercomputer, capable of operating 100 times faster than a high-end workstation for
some configurations. Teramac also contains about 220,000 defects, any one of which
could prove fatal to a more conventional machine. The architecture of Teramac, the
philosophy behind its construction, and its ability to tolerate large numbers of defects
have significant implications for any future nanometer-scale computational paradigm. It
is not necessary to chemically synthesize perfect devices with a 100% yield and assemble
them into a completely deterministic network in order to obtain a reliable and powerful
system. Future computers may not have a central processing unit, but may instead be an
extremely large configurable memory that is trained for specific tasks by a tutor. In this
article, we will describe Teramac with particular emphasis on those aspects most relevant
to scientists interested in developing computational nanotechnology. Several concepts
related to the logical architecture of Teramac are graphically presented here. (A) The
Cross Bar represents the heart of the configurable wiring network that makes up
Teramac. The inset shows a configuration bit (a memory element) that controls a switch.
The bit is located and configured using the address lines, and its status is read using the
data lines. The cross bar provides not only a means of mapping many configuration bits
together into some desired sequence, but it also represents a highly redundant wiring
network. Between any two configuration bits, there are a large number of pathways,
which implies a high communication bandwidth within a given cross bar. Logically, this
may be represented as a 'fat tree.' Such a 'fat tree' is shown in (B), where it is contrasted
with a standard tree architecture. Note that both trees appear the same from the front
view, but from an oblique view, the fat tree has a bandwidth that the standard tree does
not. Color coded dots and a dashed box are included to show the correspondence between
a given level of the fat tree and the cross bar in (A). See figure.9.

Figure: The Majority Gate

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Conclusion
Even a lot of approach has been proposed in moletronic computer. But there still exists
critical problem: most of the technologies are valid only in laboratory condition, and
cannot be produced massively.