Caltech and UCLA Researchers Create Memory Circuit the Size of a Human White
Blood Cell
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12942.html

PASADENA, Calif.--Don't throw away your laptop yet, but there's a promising
new high-tech invention being announced this week. Researchers have created
a memory circuit the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to
store the Declaration of Independence and have space left over. With 160
kilobits of capacity, it's the densest memory circuit ever fabricated.

Announcing the achievement in the January 25 issue of the journal Nature,
the team led by chemistry professor James Heath of the California Institute
of Technology says that the memory circuit is a milestone in manufacturing,
even if it's not anywhere near readiness for the market.

"It's the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year
2020," says Heath, who is the Gilloon Professor at Caltech. "But at the
moment it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional
electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions."

Snip
--------------------------------------------------------------

This would seem to be a bit more dense than my COMPUPRO 64KB Z89 computer
gathering dust in the garage.
http://www.tech.port.ac.uk/staffweb/andersod/CCS/resurrectionarticle?Article=5-7
http://www.thepcmuseum.net/hardware.php
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=651&st=1

or the Apollo Guidance Computer.

--------------------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
Snip
The Block I AGC initially had 12K words of fixed memory, but this was later
increased to 24K. Block II had 32K of fixed memory and 4K of erasable
memory.
Snip
--------------------------------------------------------------

Now for Asimov's Positronic Brain.
- LRK -
--------------------------------------------------------------
http://forums.spacebattles.com/archive/index.php/t-94702.html
Snip
Earth might have settled the Moon as early as the late seventies.

Robutt, who could hear him by radio, squeaked and bounded after.
Jimmy, expert though he was, couldn't outrace Robutt, who didn't need a
spacesuit, and had four legs and tendons of steel. Robutt sailed over
Jimmy's head, somersaulting and landing almost under his feet.
[...]
Besides, how could it be dangerous racing through the dark when Robutt was
right there with him, bouncing around and squeaking and glowing? Even
without the glow, Robutt could tell where he was, and where Jimmy was, by
radar. Jimmy couldn't go wrong while Robutt was around, tripping him when he
was too near a rock, or jumping on him to show how much he loved him, or
circling around and squeaking low and scared when Jimmy hid behind a rock,
when all the time Robutt knew well enough where he was. Once Jimmy had lain
still and pretended he was hurt and Robutt had sounded the radio alarm and
people from Lunar City got there in a hurry. Jimmy's father had let him hear
about that little trick, and Jimmy never tried it again.
[...]
He stood there on all fours, his little foot-long body quivering and glowing
just a tiny bit, and his small head, with no mouth, with two large
glassed-in eyes, and with a bump where the brain was.
[...]
"Not a real one, Jimmy. Robutt's just steel and wiring and a simple
positronic brain. It's not alive."
"He does everything I want him to do, Dad. He understands me. Sure, he's
alive."
"No, son. Robutt is just a machine. It's just programmed to act the way it
does. A dog is alive. You won't want Robutt after you have the dog."
[...]
And the little robot-mutt, which had never been held so tightly in all its
existence, squeaked high and rapid squeaks-happy squeaks.

Description and capabilities of a primitive robot used as plaything and
caretaker for children. It can operate in the vacuum, has a built-in radar
and is at least as agile as a real dog. It is implied that the robot is
sentient and not just cleverly programmed.

Snip

Robot AL-76 goes astray (circa 2005 AD).

And at the central plant, a sudden explosion of near panic took place. For
the first time in the history of the United States Robots and Mechanical Men
Corporation, a robot had escaped to the outer world. It wasn't so much that
the law forbade the presence of any robot on Earth outside a licensed
factory of the corporation. Laws could always be squared. What was much more
to the point was the statement made by one of the research mathematicians.
He said: "That robot was created to run a Disinto on the moon. Its
positronic brain was equipped for a lunar environment, and only a lunar
environment. On Earth it's going to receive seventy-five umptillion sense
impressions for which it was never prepared. There's no telling what its
reactions will be. No telling!" And he wiped a forehead that had suddenly
gone wet, with the back of his hand.

Snip

About the cost of robots. Unfortunately, the prices given are esentially
meaningless without more knowledge about the economy.

Payne paused doubtfully. "I don't think I can build one." He wondered if it
would do any good to pretend he could.
"That's all right." AL-76 could almost feel the positronic paths of his
brain weaving into a new pattern, and experienced a strange exhilaration. "I
can build one." He looked into Payne's deluxe doghouse and said. "You've got
all the material here that I need."
Randolph Payne surveyed the junk with which his shack was filled:
eviscerated radios, a topless refrigerator, rusty automobile engines, a
broken-down gas range, several miles of frayed wire, and, taking it all
together, fifty tons or thereabouts of the most heterogeneous mass of old
metal as ever caused a junkman to sniff disdainfully.

A partial failure of its positronic brain and sheer single-mindedness makes
AL-76 create its own "Disinto". This means that the robot has in-depth
knowledge/schematics of the machine it is meant to operate and can build a
reproduction with scrap electronics.


>From a rusty and massive iron base that faintly resembled something Payne
had once seen attached to a secondhand tractor, it rose upward in rakish,
drunken swerves through a bewildering mess of wires, wheels, tubes, and
nameless horrors without number, ending in a megaphone arrangement that
looked decidedly sinister.
[...]
"It's the Disinto I'm making-so I can start to work. It's an improvement on
the standard model." The robot rose, dusted his knees clankingly, and looked
at it proudly.
[...]
There exists no adequate description of what occurred afterward, in spite of
the presence of seventy eyewitnesses. [...] AL-76 pulled a switch. The
Disinto worked, and seventy-five trees, two barns, three cows and the top
three quarters of Duckbill Mountain whiffed into rarefied atmosphere. They
became, so to speak, one with the snows of yesteryear.

Description of an "improved" Disinto, which probably means Disintegrator.
Considering the extremely destructive effects, the models used in the Lunar
mines are probably a bit less impressive.

He was yelling wildly and hoarsely, "Hey, you robot, you smash that thing,
do you hear? Smash it good! You forget I ever had anything to do with it.
You're a stranger to me, see? You don't ever say a word about it. Forget it,
you hear?"
He didn't expect his orders to do any good; it was only reflex action. What
he didn't know was that a robot always obeys a human order except where
carrying it out involves danger to another human.
[...]
Austin Wilde, Robotical Engineer, turned to Sam Tobe and said, "Did you get
anything out of the robot?"
Tobe shook his head and snarled deep in his throat. "Nothing. Not one thing.
He's forgotten everything that's happened since he left the factory. He must
have gotten orders to forget, or it couldn't have left him so blank. What
was that pile of junk he'd been fooling with?"

A simple order to forget makes a robot erase its full memory so completely
that not even a qualified roboticist can recover the lost information.

Snip
--------------------------------------------------------------

Hmmmmm. :-)

Thanks for looking up with me.

Larry Kellogg

Web Site: http://lkellogg.vttoth.com/LarryRussellKellogg/
BlogSpot: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/
RSS link: http://kelloggserialreports.blogspot.com/atom.xml
Newsletter: https://news.altair.com/mailman/listinfo/lunar-update
==============================================================
http://www.physorg.com/news88874126.html
Toward Building Molecular Computers

Don't throw away your laptop yet, but there's a promising new high-tech
invention being announced this week. Researchers have created a memory
circuit the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the
Declaration of Independence and have space left over. With 160 kilobits of
capacity, it's the densest memory circuit ever fabricated.

A team of UCLA and California Institute of Technology chemists reports in
the Jan. 25 issue of the journal Nature the successful demonstration of a
large-scale, "ultra-dense" memory device that stores information using
reconfigurable molecular switches. This research represents an important
step toward the creation of molecular computers that are much smaller and
could be more powerful than today's silicon-based computers.


The 160-kilobit memory device uses interlocked molecules manufactured in the
UCLA laboratory of J. Fraser Stoddart, director of the California
NanoSystems Institute (CNSI), who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in
Nanosystems Sciences and who was awarded a knighthood by Queen Elizabeth II
less than a month ago.

A bit, or binary digit, is the basic unit of information storage and
communication in digital computing. A kilobit is equal to 1,000 bits and is
commonly used for measuring the amount of data that is transferred in one
second between two telecommunication points.

The research published in Nature describes the fabrication and operation of
a memory device. The memory is based on a series of perpendicular, crossing
nanowires, similar to a tic-tac-toe board, with 400 bottom wires and another
400 crossing top wires. Sitting at each crossing of the tic-tac-toe
structure and serving as the storage element are approximately 300 bistable
rotaxane molecules. These molecules may be switched between two different
states, and each junction of a crossbar can be addressed individually by
controlling the voltages applied to the appropriate top and bottom crossing
wires, forming a bit at each nanowire crossing.

The 160-kilobit molecular memory was fabricated at a density of
100,000,000,000 (1011) bits per square centimeter - "a density predicted for
commercial memory devices in approximately 2020," Stoddart said.

A rotaxane is a molecule in which a dumbbell-shaped component, made up of a
rod section and terminated by two stoppers, is encircled by a ring. It has
the potential to be a molecular abacus. The bistable rotaxanes behave as
switches by incorporating two different recognition sites for the ring, and
the ring sits preferentially at one of the two, said Stoddart, leader of the
UCLA team. The molecule can act as a switch provided the ring can be induced
to move from one site to the other site and then reside there for many
minutes. The bistable rotaxane molecules used in the crossbar memory can be
switched at very modest voltages from an "off" (low conductivity) to an "on"
(high conductivity) state. The stoppers for the rotaxane molecules are
designed to allow the molecules to be organized into single-molecule-thick
layers, after which they are incorporated into the memory device, Stoddart
said.

Snip

Toward Building Molecular
Computers from PhysOrg.com

Don't throw away your laptop yet, but there's a promising new high-tech
invention being announced this week. Researchers have created a memory
circuit the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to store the
Declaration of Independence and have space left over. With 160 kilobits of
capacity, it's the densest memory circuit ever fabricated.

[...]

==============================================================
Caltech and UCLA Researchers Create Memory Circuit the Size of a Human White
Blood Cell
http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12942.html

PASADENA, Calif.--Don't throw away your laptop yet, but there's a promising
new high-tech invention being announced this week. Researchers have created
a memory circuit the size of a white blood cell that has enough capacity to
store the Declaration of Independence and have space left over. With 160
kilobits of capacity, it's the densest memory circuit ever fabricated.

Announcing the achievement in the January 25 issue of the journal Nature,
the team led by chemistry professor James Heath of the California Institute
of Technology says that the memory circuit is a milestone in manufacturing,
even if it's not anywhere near readiness for the market.

"It's the sort of device that Intel would contemplate making in the year
2020," says Heath, who is the Gilloon Professor at Caltech. "But at the
moment it furthers our goal of learning how to manufacture functional
electronic circuitry at molecular dimensions."

The 2020 date assumes the validity of Moore's law, which states that the
complexity of an integrated circuit will typically double every year.
Current memory-cell size is .0408 square micrometers, so Moore's law assumes
that the electronics industry will achieve a device density comparable to
the Heath team's memory circuit in about 13 years.

However, the Caltech-UCLA team points out in their Nature article that
manufacturers can see no clear way at present of extending this
miniaturization beyond the year 2013. The new approach of the Heath team,
therefore, will show the potential for making integrated circuits at smaller
and smaller dimensions.

"Whether it's actually possible to get this new memory circuit into a
laptop, I don't know," says Heath. "But we have time."

The 160,000 memory bits are arranged like a large tic-tac-toe board: 400
silicon wires crossed by 400 titanium wires, with a layer of molecular
switches sandwiched between the crossing wires. Each wire crossing defines a
bit, and a single bit is only 15 nanometers wide, or about one
ten-thousandth the diameter of a human hair. By contrast, the most dense
memory devices currently available are approximately 140 nanometers in
width.

The molecular switches, called [2]rotaxanes, comprise two interlocking
components--a molecular ring encircling a dumbbell-shaped molecule--that
together are similar to a wedding band on a finger. When the molecular
switch is electronically triggered, the ring slides between two locations on
the dumbbell. Switching, then, arises from the different conductivities of
the molecular switch with respect to the ring position.

Heath's group manufactured the memory circuit in a clean-room facility in
their labs at Caltech, and the molecular switches were prepared by J. Fraser
Stoddart, who holds UCLA's Fred Kavli Chair in Nanosystems Sciences, and his
group.

The circuit has a bit density of 100 gigabit per square centimeter, which
Heath's fellow lead author Jonathan Green says sets the record for
integration density in a man-made object.

"We showed we can increase the density to nearly 1,000 gigabits per square
centimeter, but, beyond that, there is almost no point, because you begin to
run out of molecules," says Green, a Caltech graduate student in chemistry
and applied physics.

The capability to manufacture electronic circuitry at such extreme
dimensions opens up a host of new applications, ranging from extremely
sensitive chemical and biological sensors, energy-efficient logic circuits,
and a class of high-performance energy-conversion materials known as
thermoelectrics.

The other lead author of the paper is Jang Wook Choi, a graduate student in
chemical engineering at Caltech. The other authors are Akram Boukai, Yuri
Bunimovich, Ezekiel Johnston-Halperin, Erica DeIonno, Yi Luo, Bonnie
Sheriff, Ke Xu, and Young Shik Shin, all graduate students in Caltech's
Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, and Hsian-Rong Tseng and
Stoddart, both of UCLA.

Contact: Robert Tindol (626) 395-3631 tindol@caltech.edu
==============================================================

WHAT THE MIND CAN CONCEIVE, AND BELIEVE, IT WILL ACHIEVE - LRK

==============================================================