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Opportunities, Challenges and the Road Ahead
for Field-Coupled Nanocomputing:
A Panel Discussion
B
)
and Ilke Ercan
Neal G. Anderson
(
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,
University of Massachusetts Amherst, Amherst, MA, USA
{
anderson,iercan
}
@ecs.umass.edu
Abstract.
The FCN'13 Workshop, held at the University of South
Florida in February 2013, concluded with a panel discussion on oppor-
tunities and critical challenges facing research in field-coupled nanocom-
puting. The panelists were Craig Lent (Notre Dame), Wolfgang Porod
(Notre Dame), and Robert Wolkow (Alberta). Questions were posed to
the panel and to all workshop participants by moderator Neal Ander-
son (UMass Amherst), and by the panelists and participants themselves.
What follows is an edited transcript of that discussion. All participants
in this discussion had the opportunity to review the edited transcript
and offer corrections and clarifications. Editor's notations are enclosed
in square brackets.
Anderson
(Neal): Let's start out with the most urgent and critical challenges
facing the research community. What are the things we should be focused on to
really enable further progress in field-coupled nanocomputing?
Porod
(Wolfgang): Well, as you know, we've been at this for a while, starting
out with Craig Lent in the beginning. One of the things I've learned over the
years is how tough it is to try to beat CMOS. Think back to the early days of
the transistor. Even though the transistor was very reliable, it still had to com-
pete with vacuum tubes, which were at a much more primitive level than we're
at today. So I think you need some reliable primitives that you can engineer,
aiming at experimental realizations of this discrete coupling phenomenon. With-
out that, I think it's very tough. And I think that, even if you have a reliable
primitive, there is still the issue of what are you going to do with it.
But overall the real issue here is that, if you are targeting computing, you're
up against a very high bar. The state of the art is just extremely complicated.
Some of the lower hanging fruits might be in different kinds of applications,
like sensing. I'm thinking, for example, about the beautiful work that we've
heard about - single atoms and the like - which might make extremely sensitive
chemical sensors. As a community, I think we might keep our eyes open for
those kinds of applications and not just go after beating CMOS.
Wo lkow
(Robert): One of the problems we have is that we're sort of leading a
group of one. You want to be prominent in a field and hopefully lead in some
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