IBM's quest to make atom-sized chips

seaeagle

An interesting read for anyone interested in technology:

A man and his microscope: IBM's quest to make atom-sized chips | The Register

Quote:

When taken into the room holding the world's highest resolution microscope, we expected to witness a pristine marvel of engineering. Workers in bunny suits would be rushing around in an ultra-clean chamber, tweaking the microscope with refined instruments and unparalleled care. Instead, we found a hand-crafted oddity composed of tin foil, a maze of cables and iced tea cans. Somehow this monster can resolve the height variations of a surface down to about 1/10,000 the diameter of a typical atom, according to its creator IBM Fellow Don Eigler.

Eigler works at IBM's idyllic Almaden Research Center and is best-known - at least in certain circles - for using the scanning tunneling microscope in 1990 to spell out I-B-M with atoms.

We recently sat down with the pony-tailed researcher-cum-surfer to discuss past and present work being done at IBM to create nanoscale computers. Eigler walked us through the burden of being the "atom man" and talked up a new technique for building processors one spin at a time.

(Read the rest of this 3 page interview at the above link)

The world's highest-resolution microscope.

<<-- click to expand

Werebo

from the look of his workbench, he's a man after my own heart, when I was into mucking about with old TV's, radios and amps Laughing

...

seaeagle

Werebo

Oh, and don't forget the obligatory 6" of knicker elastic and a yoghurt pot Wink

User: inactive Posts:

We could joke around about the mess on his workbench till the cows come home and it wouldn't deminish what he's accomplished.

That's the way quantum leaps in technology take place.

When I was doing instrumentation for Caterpillar Tractor company, we were unable to just go to a store and buy most of the instruments and test fixtures that we needed in our testing labs. We had to make our own.

Sometimes, the first draft of a new instrument or test fixture, looked somewhat like that workbench in the picture in Seaeagle's post.

That engineer has both my respect and my sympathy. Laughing

Werebo