A team from Harvard University and the non-profit military contractor The MITRE Corporation are claiming a miniaturisation breakthrough with what they say is the smallest finite state machine ever built.
Their “nanoFSM” is, the group claims, “the densest nanoelectronic system ever built”. It comprises hundreds of transistors built of non-volatile nanowires that retain their state without power.
This, the researchers say, is the first time such a technology has produced a system that can be described as a complex and programmable nanocomputer.
Working with features sometimes smaller than a nanometre, the researchers first assembled the nanowire transistors into tiles, then organised the tiles into circuits, and finally provided the circuits with connections to the outside world. As the image below shows, connectivity needs far more space than the nanoFSM itself.
via The Register UK
