Nanocomputers Today and in the Future

Today, humanity strives for optimization, comfort, and simplicity. These impulses drive us to take a fresh look at everything around us, spot shortcomings and bottlenecks, and automate and improve them.

One common shortcoming is an inconvenient shape or size. As a result, we have already made computers smaller and their displays thinner without sacrificing performance. You might think they couldn’t get any smaller—personal computers have already reached pocket size. But the project to create nanocomputers is aimed largely at a different market, and has already prompted government programs in Japan, the United States, the EU, and around fifty other countries.

Various costly, long-term approaches to creating nanocomputers aim to achieve operating frequencies of 100 GHz or higher, with heat dissipation of just 3 mW. Nanoelectronics will not only transform today’s information technology, but also make it possible to reduce the minimum viable size of a computer to the subcellular level.

A leading technology for creating nanostructures is nanoscale lithography, essentially a descendant of the fine-scale lithography used today to manufacture computer chips.

Chemical self-assembly also has good prospects. The idea of a self-reproducing structure based on John von Neumann’s cellular automaton was published back in 1966, but only now have technologies advanced to the point where it can be put into practice.

The wiring system in these computers presents both major challenges and major opportunities.
Nanotubes—rolled-up hexagonal lattices of carbon atoms—are the strongest and thinnest conductors, eliminating electrical losses entirely but creating a new problem: large amounts of heat. Proposed cooling methods for a molecular-scale computer include liquid helium, beams of supercooled electrons, and even outer space, where the temperature remains at 3 K.



For now, the main applications are in medicine. Nanocomputers are intended to make DNA analysis easier, particularly the decoding of the genetic code of living organisms. This procedure is currently performed on a wide range of laboratory specimens, from fruit flies and ordinary tomatoes to humans. Once DNA has been decoded, scientists will be able to learn a great deal about how nature’s mechanisms for storing and transmitting data work.



As for the computer itself, no nanocomputer exists yet. Building a computer this small without losing functionality is an extremely difficult task. It requires enormous human effort and a huge financial investment. Still, work on designing and building this device is already well underway, even if progress is slow. So far, only nanotransistors for nanocomputers have been successfully developed, but this is undoubtedly a significant step toward creating the “computer of the future.”