www.techreview. com/articles/may00/ rotman.htm
An excellent article from Technology Review Magazine providing an overview of Reed, Tour, and others working in the field
 
http://web-ext2.darpa. mil/mto/mole/
Department of Defense Research Projects Agency (DARPA) site with ongoing projects listed
 
www.calmec.com
California Molecular Electronic Corporation site with demonstrations of research
 
 
 
Colonization of Mars
 
Could scientists accidentally destroy the universe?

Imagine a small vial containing trillions of transistors, running at speeds measured in terahertz. Forget silicon chips constructed in a series of long, exacting steps. Chemists will mix the right ingredients under very specific conditions and the molecular electronic devices will assemble themselves!

The field is called molecular electronics, or moletronics for short. Chemist Jim Tour of Rice University and physicist Mark Reed of Yale have pioneered the new technology that could spell the death of silicon in the next twenty year. Large corporations, such as IBM and Hewlett-Packard, are heavily committed to research and development and, in his final State of the Union address, President Clinton proposed spending nearly a half a billion dollars on molecular computing and nanotechnology.

There is good reason to proceed. Leaders in the semiconductor industry worry about reaching the limits of silicon technology. A Pentium chip contains millions of transistors on a board barely several molecules thick. The manufacturing process requires very precise etching and quality control. Millions of molecular devices can take up the space of only one silicon transistor and run millions of times faster. The cost savings and versatility of moletronics are also enormous. A terabyte of capacity might cost less than ten cents and the product could be printed, painted, sprayed, or glued onto virtually anything.

Although skeptics abound and major difficulties remain to be solved, moletronics appears to be one of the most promising scientific developments of our time.

Source: "Moletronics Will Change Everything," Wired, July 2000, vol. 8, no. 7, pp. 240-251.

PROBLEM SOLVING: What new products are possible with this new technology? What impact will moletronics have on existing technologies? What role should the government play in the development of molecular electronics? What challenges would such an easily applied technology pose for privacy and security?

Molecular electronics (moletronics) - technology that combines chemistry and electronics to produce molecule-sized devices that function like silicon chips.

Molecular memory systems are so small and powerful that the entire Internet could be saved on one desktop.

The first commercial use of moletronics is expected to be for computer memory.

Concerning his work in the science of molecular electronics, Mark Reed says, "I'm not here to get rich. I'm not here to minimize my work hours, believe me. I do it for the excitement."

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