Experimentalists have shown that carbon nanotubes are among the most electrically conductive materials known. It also has been shown that individual carbon nanotube molecules can be used to make electrical switches and wires. Building upon these discoveries, this presentation first will display and discuss explicit novel designs for electronic digital logic circuits that might be made from such carbon nanotube switches and wires. That is, it will be shown how carbon nanotubes might be employed to design a carbon-based molecular-scale electronic digital computer. To implement these designs, though, it is necessary to have new techniques in nanotube chemistry that will permit the mass fabrication of precisely designed nanostructures. To that end, the presenters also will discuss a new chemical technique that has been designed for this purpose. Computer simulations of this macroscopically controlled nanofabrication technique indicate that it should produce nanopatterned circuit-like carbon structures in quantity. Taken together, these proposals for new molecular-scale circuit designs and molecular-scale fabrication techniques provide a possible route to the mass fabrication of ultra-dense molecular-scale computer circuits embedded in a carbon-based nanostructured material.
James C. Ellenbogen, Ph.D.
Principal Scientist, Nanosystems Group, The MITRE Corporation, Mailstop W635
1820 Dolley Madison Boulevard, McLean, VA 22102
Phone: (703) 883-5930; FAX: (703) 883-5963/1396
E-mail: firstname.lastname@example.org; WWW: http://www.mitre.org/technology/nanotech