The smallest chain you have ever seen.

Redshift

Take a look at this for small, Makes you wonder about the future applications in areas like medicine. How long will it be before surgery involves doctors injecting a tiny robot inside your body to carry out a proceedure.

Sandia National Laboratories has engineered the world’s smallest chain. The distance between chain link centers is only 50 microns. In comparison, the diameter of a human hair is approximately 70 microns. This micro-chain has been made on the surface of a silicone substrate using photo-lithographic techniques, just like computer chips are made. It rests on, and is driven by, several micro-gears. Devices like this one that have physically moving parts on a computer chip are called MEMS – Micro Electro Mechanical Systems.
This micro-chain can be used to supply power to multiple parts of a micro system, very much like the drive belt in a 19th-century sewing factory. There, a central engine shaft powered by steam turned drive belts to power distant work stations - for example, sewing machines - before the dawn of the age of electricity. The microchain could also be used to drive microcamera shutters, and in mechanical timing and decoding.

Soon, all the electro-mechanical machines you know of and a host of new ones will be miniaturized and enabled with MEMS technology. Not too long from today, we may have micro-robots that one takes as a pill, which go directly to the problem/disease and fight it with targeted medicine delivery, or which zip around inside of our veins and arteries and clean clogs. On a less practical note, eventually, cats and dogs may have to deal with fleas on bicycles, or even solar driven micro motorcycles. The flea circus will have a whole new meaning.

Aaron_Ragmaan

I don't know about nanites (if thats what your implying) but i do know that Moores law is very close to coming to an end, but this is pretty amazing stuff, im sure there are far more uses than camera shutters! but well done on the find!

Capt'n Midnight

Aaron_Ragmaan wrote: »

i do know that Moores law is very close to coming to an end, but this is pretty amazing stuff, im sure there are far more uses than camera shutters! but well done on the find!

Moores law ain't dead yet, we have barely started down the road of multiple processors. Silicon isn't the only material, and we could be using light too, and we haven't reached the limits of silicon in terms of speed, ( cooling is an issue though )

we are getting close to limits all right, at 3GHz light only travels 10cm in a clock cycle. AT 30GHz it's 1cm, which does put a limit on how far apart you can have interdependent regions of a CPU ( other parts of a CPU could be further away )

Capt'n Midnight

IIRC one of the main funders of this sort of research are the military. One key use is in the arming mechanisms of nuclear weapons. Kinda hard to bypass a lock so small you can't see it .

John mac

Aaron_Ragmaan wrote: »

I don't know about nanites (if thats what your implying) but i do know that Moores law is very close to coming to an end, but this is pretty amazing stuff, im sure there are far more uses than camera shutters! but well done on the find!

That was 6 years ago!!!!!

judas101

Aaron_Ragmaan wrote: »

i do know that Moores law is very close to coming to an end

How exactly do you know this? Define very close.

The end of Moores law has been forseen (falsely) for decades and never wavered.

With EUV litho on the horizon, you'll have egg on your face for that prediction.

mikhail

judas101 wrote: »

How exactly do you know this? Define very close.

The end of Moores law has been forseen (falsely) for decades and never wavered.

With EUV litho on the horizon, you'll have egg on your face for that prediction.

The guy you quote may be talking out of an orifice best kept for other purposes, but there is reason to think Moore's Law is in trouble.

Current technology is 40nm. EUV lithography should take that down to 13.5nm. An atom is 0.1nm. There's only so much shrinkage left, and paramagnetic effects etc are getting weird at the lengths we're at now. They're keeping it going, but it's getting tough, and there are real physical limits on the horizon. Maybe the industry can do some clever stuff to overcome that, but Moore's law is an exponential growth - that's imposisble to maintain forever.

A second argument I've seen, quite an interesting one I think, is that in parallel with the processor speed increase, the cost of a lithography plant has been doubling with every generation. The talk I saw this in gave a projection where just a couple of decades from now, the cost of one of these plants could exceed the GDP of the USA. No one will build such a plant.