The Computer Inside You

摘要

The rapid pace of miniaturization in electron-ics has become harder and harder to fathom. It's not the speed of that progress, really. It's the small-ness of it. The latest developments are hard to comprehend because they're impossible for the human eye to see. Take some of the most recent, and astounding, work done at Bell Labs, the birthplace of the transistor―the basic building block of our microprocessors and memory chips. Scientists there have created molecular-scale transistors that are roughly one-millionth the size of a grain of sand―or smaller. Now pause with me and wrap your brain around that one more time: one-millionth the size of a grain of sand. It's enough to give you a headache at the beach. As long as your brain is in astounded mode, let's rebuff the conventional wisdom about such miniaturization, and entertain the notion that even Bell Labs' finest know not the ramifications of what they do. Yes, as they predict, these tiny transistors will inevitably lead to exponentially more powerful computers. That's an easy equation: More transistors on a chip equals faster microprocessors or larger-capacity memory chips. But that says very little about the potentially life-changing effects of molecular-scale computers.