New Chip Design Revealed

On p. A16 of this morning New York Times , there is a piece entitled "Researchers go Molecular in Design of a Denser Chip." It details work done at Caltech and UCLA led by James Heath and Fraser Stoddart that produced a memory chip roughly the size of a white blood cell. While the researchers were quick to point out that this was more proof of concept and they were unsure if it could be scaled to manufacture, the research is an exciting example of work being done in nanoelectronics. A crucial component to the device is a molecular switch which "belongs to a class of molecules known as rotaxanes."This formed the basis of the chip's ability to contain some 160,000 bits of information.