Memristors And Other Nanoscale Devices  - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: SgtRock
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: July 16, 2012, 06:27:25 pm
content: Greetings EEVBees:--Please see below links. The first includes a few quotes from a speech by Memristor Inventor R. Stanley Williams of HP, before the Kavli Foundation, about how HP and Hynix plan to make money from this discovery. As always Doctor Stan has some very interesting things to say.http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/09/hp_memristor_and_photons/"Communication is done by photons, computation by electrons and storage by ions""We're not going to make money off these chips. We are going to make money by building cool systems utilizing these chips"--The second link includes quotes from a roundtable discussion at TKF featuring 1) Michelle Simmons, Scientia Professor and Director of the Australian Centre of Excellence for Quantum Computation and Communication Technology, 2) Paul Weiss, Kavli Professor at UCLA and Director of the California NanoSystems Institute, 3) R.Stanley Williams, Hewlett-Packard Senior Fellow and director of the company's Cognitive Systems Laboratory.http://www.kavlifoundation.org/science-spotlights/how-atomic-scale-devices-are-transforming-electronics--I do not understand the below quote. To my mind Dr. Weiss either misspoke or is being misquoted."PAUL WEISS: Light is a much faster way to communicate along a device than electrons. But the wavelength of light is much larger than the semiconductor structures we make now. People are used to moving light around with large-scale mirrors or splitters, things we lay out on an optical table. Investigators have come up with very clever ways to do that with nanoscale structures. If we can cut down the size of these structures by one, two, or more orders of magnitude, things start getting exciting about the speed and amount of information we can move on a chip or between chips."--Now if "the wavelength of light is much larger than the semiconductor structures we make now.", will not making the structures even smaller make the wavelengths ever larger by comparison?--If anyone would care to clear up my confusion on the last quote, please do. Also I would like to know where to find the full minutes of the speeches and roundtables at The Kavli Foundation."Three weeks in the lab will save you a day in the library every time"R. Stanley Williams 1951 -Best RegardsClear Ether

author: nitro2k01
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 09:01:49 am
content: The last quote talks about the smallest feature size in an integrated circuit as a function of the wavelength of light used. Wavelength here approximately means "color". (It's more complicated than that, but let's say keep at that for this discussion.) For example, light with wavelengths 500 to 570 nm count as green light and 450 to 500 nm counts as blue light. Light beyond that is what you call ultraviolet.The wavelength matters because of how relativity stipulates that light is both a particle and a wave. In semiconductor manufacturing, you create the patterns used for the transistors and conductors inside the chip by projecting light onto the die. But when you're trying to make design features that are close to the wavelength of light being used in the process, you get interference effects and cancellation of two light waves. Recall the double slit experiment from physics class in school for example. (*)And you can't really print features that are smaller than half the wavelength of the light being used. For example, you couldn't use visible light (hundreds of nanometers long) to produce a transistor that's 30 nm big. So as the semiconductor business is racing for smaller transistor sizes, they're also using light with smaller and smaller wavelengths to avoid the interference effects. (Well, you can actually do it using some clever tricks, but in principle, smaller semiconductor feature sizes = smaller light wavelengths are needed.)This article, and quote, is not about semiconductor manufacturing, however, but communication between chips, or between different parts of a chip, using light. But similar rules apply. Say that instead of using electricity to transfer a signal, you use a beam of light. If you're trying to use say a 565 nm wavelength green light beam to transfer data, (say using an LED on a chip) and everything in the circuit is in the 10 nm order of magnitude, you're going to have a problem. I can't really explain what would happen, but I guess the light would pretty much cancel out itself before it had a chance to move. So, to transfer information of such short distances, you need an LED or other electronic light source which is very small, and can generate UV light with a much smaller wavelength than is currently possible.When he's talking about an optical table, he's talking about one of these things, used to split and guide a laser beam, and the prospect of producing something equivalent on the nanoscale. But again, this is only meaningful if you can produce light with a small enough wavelength.So no, I don't think he was misquoted.(*) I think these videos will explain the effect decently using waves in water as examples.

author: chrome
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 04:29:12 pm
content: Am I the only one noticing the pattern that ALL of sgtrock's threads have 1 star?

author: nitro2k01
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 05:18:18 pm
content: Quote from: chrome on July 18, 2012, 04:29:12 pmOne hater is all it takes. That's the problem with a mostly ignored rating system. Maybe he deserves, but I replied because I found the question interesting.

author: dbinokc
author_rank: Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 06:01:27 pm
content: I think the comment made by Paul Weiss is referring to the difference between near field and far field optics. Far field covers things like we are used to seeing, such as lenses and mirrors. When you start getting down to one wavelength scale, then near field effects start becoming dominant. Things like interference patterns and the ability to play games with lithography masks to get features below 193nm.

author: SeanB
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 07:49:39 pm
content: There's a rating system???

author: chrome
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 08:07:55 pm
content: Quote from: nitro2k01 on July 18, 2012, 05:18:18 pmIt's not just one person though, if that was the case another voter could equal it to 2.5 stars but that hasn't happened.

author: ivan747
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: July 18, 2012, 08:35:12 pm
content: Can we memristors in a 0805 package pleaseI want some of them packages in an SO-8 package with an I2C interface.

author: nixxon
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: July 31, 2012, 09:26:32 pm
content: Talking about orders of magniude:Check out this stuff regarding Femto-Photography: Visualizing Photons in Motion at aTrillion Frames Per Second:http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar//trillionfps/"AbstractWe have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second..."Enjoy