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trends in architecture or trends in science or anything. There are so many exam-
ples of where society goes in a direction that only very slowly is shown not to be
worth following. As some areas that have enjoyed much support are shown to not
pan out we will see redirection of funds to paths that lately haven't been main-
stream. Greg Snider's work connecting CMOS to SETs and to field-controlled
elements will gain new prominence and support, I expect.
Porod:
I have a slightly different view. QCA has been around for quite some
time; it's getting close to twenty years now. It's very hard to find examples of
anything that has had sustained funding for twenty years - it's just a very long
time. In terms of funding, I don't want to say there's been a tremendous amount
of funding, but there certainly
has
been funding for this research. You always
want to see more of it, obviously. And I think what Craig was saying is correct:
The less you know about something, the easier it is to get funding because you
live on promise. Then you start doing experiments and you realize how hard it
is. Knowing a lot works against you. So I think we're seeing a little bit of that.
In parallel to knowing more, I think it would have helped to really come up
with something that works reliably. We're still struggling with this.
Anderson:
Any other comments along the lines of critical challenges?
Wang
(Peng): Is QCA the only technique that could take over the common
CMOS technology. How does the future of QCA look in comparison to other
research, like research related to graphene and carbon nanotubes?
Wo lkow:
Looking at the prospects for those other approaches, I can't convince
myself that they are more worth pursuing than what I'm pursuing. I'm doing
what I'm doing because I think it has the best prospects. With nanotube tran-
sistors, for example, they really need to create tunnel transistors where you go
from one discrete level to the other ultimately to try and beat the subthreshold
slope problem. With years of effort in that area, there's really no significant
progress. And there's the terrible fabrication problem, and not only of the nan-
otubes themselves and separation of the nanotubes, but also the placement of
them. So I see (A) that they haven't shown great prospects, and (B) that even
if they did, they wouldn't know how to make them. So that, for example, is one
area that I wouldn't prefer to pursue. IBM has, to my knowledge, essentially
dropped graphene as an electronic material, although they're still working on it
for optical properties that they're more interested in. So I really think that this
is the thing to pursue. Of course, I'm terribly biased.
Anderson:
Not the gravitational QCA idea? [Laughter]
Wa lus :
Planetary QCA!
Anderson:
Planetary QCA - you heard it here first. So along these same lines,
but maybe a little more focused, what's the one problem - for nanomagnet
logic, for charge QCA (molecular or atomic) - what's the one problem that, if
you could solve tomorrow, would really help you move down the road?
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