Molecular Electronic Circuit Analysis
James C. Ellenbogen*
Nanosystems Group, The MITRE Corporation,
McLean, VA 22102 USA
This is an abstract
for a presentation given at the
Eighth
Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology.
There will be a link from here to the full article when it is
available on the web.
Recently there have been impressive experimental demonstrations of
individual conductive molecular wires and molecular electrical switches.
The next logical step toward the development of an electronic computer
integrated on the molecular scale is to incorporate several such molecular
wires and several such molecular switches into a single molecular circuit
structure designed to perform a simple digital computation, such as
addition [1,2]. The speaker will describe the results from quantitative
analyses of designs for such conductive monomolecular circuit structures.
For example, this molecular circuit analysis reveals that molecular
electronic circuits are likely to switch and to compute better than
analogous micron-scale, solid-state circuits. The speaker also will
discuss research which has resulted in the development of a prototype
software tool for performing these molecular circuit analyses. The tool
provides a graphical interface in which one can assemble a model of a
molecular circuit structure, for which it analyzes the electrical
performance. This tool has been tentatively named "MolSPICE", since it
performs analyses for molecular circuits that are similar to those
performed by the well-known and widely available SPICE tool that is used in
the analysis of microelectronic circuits.
[1] J. C. Ellenbogen and J. C. Love, "Architectures for molecular
electronic computers: 1. Logic structures and an adder designed from
molecular electronic diodes," Proceedings of the IEEE, vol. 88, no. 3,
March 2000, pp. 386-426.
[2] A preprint of reference 1 above is available on the Web at the URL:
www.mitre.org/technology/nanotech
*Corresponding Address:
James C. Ellenbogen, Ph.D.
Principal Scientist, Nanosystems Group
The MITRE Corporation
1820 Dolley Madison Blvd., Mailstop W635
McLean, VA 22102 USA
E-mail: [email protected]
WWW: http://www.mitre.org/technology/nanotech
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