AN INTRODUCTION TO NANOCOMPUTING - Bio-Inspired and Nanoscale Integrated Computing - page 27

MIT, and CIT in order to facilitate research in such a promising field. Leading
researchers such as Dr. Charles M. Lieber of Harvard University have contributed
greatly to the advancement of nanocomputing. Dr. Lieber, along with his
associate Jong-in Hahm, Ph.D., recently helped start a company called NanoSys,
Inc., which is currently in the process of developing nanowire technology and
other nanotech products. Other researchers include neuroscientist Rodolfo R.
Llinas of the New York University School of Medicine and Masayuki Nakao of
the University of Tokyo [45, 47]. As the general public can see, the advent of
nanotechnology is one that will affect the lives of people worldwide and not simply
arrive to us as a packaged fad whose hype is short lived.
The great deal of research that is currently being done on the neurological
applications of nanotechnology was bolstered when six scientists at Brown
University were awarded $4.25 million to begin research on such interactions in
the mammalian nervous system. Along with many professionals from an array of
different fields—surgery, chemistry, physics, and others—these brilliant minds are
collaborating to help advance knowledge and further discovery of nanotechnol-
ogy and nanocomputing. This commitment to research, coupled with a great
amount of popular sentiment towards nanotechnology and nanocomputing, may
further our own knowledge as observers and students and accelerate the progress
of this exciting phenomenon. For more information on funding and patenting
issues, see Chapter 20.
1.8. CONCLUSIONS
For the past 50 years, transistors have been shrinking consistently, and we have
entered the era of nanocomputing. In this new era, transistors are only a small
portion of the technologies that are available at nanoscale. There is a vast landscape
of nano devices and paradigms that are currently being studied. In this chapter, we
gave a brief introduction to nanocomputing and presented a high level overview of
nanocomputing devices and paradigms. Nanocomputing has a potential to provide
a remedy for some traditional problems in microelectronics. We also discussed some
applications of nanocomputing such as bio medical engineering and neuroscience.
The rest of this topic will take the reader on a journey from low level device physics
to architecture-level, bio-inspired architectures, all of which have the potential to be
used for implementing various devices, such as biomedical and biomimetic
nanoscale integrated circuits.
REFERENCES
1. R. P. Feynman. There's plenty of room at the bottom: an invitation to enter a new field
of physics. Engineering and Science, 23(5): 1960.
2. Wikipedia. List of Intel Microprocessors. 2007. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?
title=List_of_Intel_microprocessors&oldid=181278285.