Electrical & Computer Engineering     |     Carnegie Mellon
     

Thursday, April 24, 12:30-1:30 p.m. HH-1112

Daniel L. Rosewater
Carnegie Mellon University

Practical NanoComputing: Overcoming Fundamental Obstacles

In the near future, further increases in the performance of silicon-based, lithographically manufactured transistors will be difficult to achieve, for both technical and economic reasons. Chemically assembled electronic nanotechnology (CAEN) holds great promise as a technology to overcome these obstacles. CAEN presents an entirely different set of design constraints than silicon lithography; most importantly, only two-terminal devices will be available at the nanoscale for practical, large-scale circuits. Can we really live without a nano-transistor? In this talk, I present simulation results for a molecular latch, a device constructed solely from two-terminal CAEN devices, that is capable of providing signal restoration. The molecular latch, combined with diode-resistor logic and inversion by the computing substrate, provide the necessary ingredients for realistic computer architectures fashioned from molecular components.

Bio
Dan Rosewater is a first-year graduate student in the CS department working with Dr. Seth Goldstein. Upon graduating from Wesleyan University (Middletown, CT) in 1995 with degrees in Chemistry and Molecular Biology, Mr. Rosewater worked as an organic chemist at Neurogen, a small pharmaceutical company in Branford, CT. In 1997, he moved to the Computational Chemistry department at Neurogen, and lead the team that designed an informatics and data mining system for rapid drug discovery (http://www.aidd.com). Mr. Rosewater's current research combines his interests in chemistry and computers to better the world in new ways.