A team of researchers at Yale University say they’ve built a single-molecular switch, a big leap on the road to even smaller computers. Professor Mark Reed demonstrated the “single-molecule electret” on October 12th, which was able to convert from one stable state to another. This involved the insertion of a Gadolinium atom inside a carbon buckyball and then applied an electric field, activating and deactivating the switch.
Reed worked in partnership with researches from Rensselaer Ply, as well as the universities of Nanjing, Renmin, and Xiamen. He said that the “module is acting as if it has two stable polarization states,” and it’s even possible to use it to “make a memory of it.” That means there’s is a little possibility that, in the nearest future, it could be possible to build CPUs and memory chips at a molecular scale.
It should be seen that we’re a long, long way from being able to build a molecular computer, but this is an encouraging fresh start. Proving that such a machine is possible opens the doors to more research in the future.
This is important because the computing world runs on switches, CPUs are essentially filled with billions of tiny switches. And in order for our machines to get faster, their brains need to get smaller — something that Intel is currently struggling to achieve.
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