Nanocomputers


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History

Since Feynam’s “There is Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, nanotechnology has become a hot topic.
With computers being an integral part in today’s society, nanocomputers are the easiest and most likely route in which computer development may continue.

Moore’s Law

According to Moore’s Law, the number of transistors that will fit on a silicon chip doubles every eighteen months.
Presently, microprocessors have more than forty million transistors; by 2010 they could have up to five billion.
By the year 2020, the trend line of Moore’s law states that there should be a one nanometer feature size.

Electrical Nanocomputers

Electronic nanocomputers would operate in a manner similar to the way present-day microcomputers work.
Due to our fifty years of experience with electronic computing devices, advances in nanocomputing technology are likely to come in this direction. 

How it works

Although electronic nanocomputers will not use the traditional concept of transistors for its components, they will still operate by storing information in the positions of electrons. 
There are several methods of nanoelectronic data storage currently being researched.  Among the most promising are single electron transistors and quantum dots.
All of these devices function based upon the principles of quantum mechanics.

Nanosystems

Drexler declared that the nanocomputer could contain about, 106 transistor like interlocks within a 400nm cube, have clock speeds of about 1 GHz with an execution time of about 1000 MIPS; all with only about 60nW of power consumption.
Ralph Merkle stated that, “In the future we'll pack more computing power into a sugar cube than the sum total of all the computer power that exists in the world today.”

Chemical Nanocomputers

Also known as biochemical nanocomputers, they would store and process information in terms of chemical structures and interactions.
The development of a chemical nanocomputer will likely proceed along lines similar to genetic engineering.
Engineers must figure out how to get individual atoms and molecules to perform controllable calculations and data storage tasks .