Today in the journal Nature, researchers led by Charles Lieber report a big step forward in the field of tiny computing: the creation of linked-up logic circuits made of nanowires, which could be used to build itty-bitty processors.
The devices described in the paper layer additional wires across the germanium-silicon ones; charges can be trapped in these wires, influencing the behavior of the underlying nanowires. This charge trapping is nonvolatile but reversible; in other words, you can switch one of the nanowires on or off by altering the charge stored in its neighborhood. This makes it possible to turn the nanowires into a standard field-effect transistor (the authors term them NWFETs for "nanowire field-effect transistors"). [Ars Technica]
Lieber had been able to create simple versions of those NWFETs before, but those were difficult to build on a large enough scale to create logic circuits.
Lieber’s team reports in this week’s ...
