Atomic scale electronic switches

gotjosh writes "The EU nanoforum reports that Japanese scientists have used nanowires to create atomic switches and demonstrate basic logic cuircuts! Tsuyoshi Hasegawa of the National Institute for Materials Science claims that their atomic scale switches will improve performance over today's mechanical semiconductor devices (possibly by several orders of magnitude depending on wire capacitance) . More information (such as the elecrolytes they used and that the researchers reported their work in /Nature/) is available here without a login."