CONCLUDING REMARKS AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW COMPUTING ERA - Bio-Inspired and Nanoscale Integrated Computing - page 537

TABLE 20 . 2 . List of Some Public and Private Agencies Funding Nanocomputing

Private companies Public agencies

IBM National Science Foundation

Intel Department of Defense

Hewlett-Packard Department of Energy

Lucent Technologies National Institute of Health

Motorola NASA

NEC CIA

The remaining materials of the topic where presented in two parts. In Part I,
which included Chapter 2 to Chapter 10, various types of technologies that could
be used in the design of nanoscale devices and paradigms were presented. In the
second part, which included Chapter 11 to Chapter 19, a set of bio-inspired
models and applications were presented.

20.1.1. Nanoscale Integrated Circuits
Chapter 2 gave an introductory overview of the ideas and techniques used to
develop nanoscale devices. It described how resonant tunneling diodes, single-
electron transistors, and quantum dots operate. Carbon nanotubes were used as
an example of how new materials can provide creative solutions to overcome
difficulties that arise at this small scale. It gave a very brief, high-level introduction
to quantum mechanics, discussing the Schro¨ dinger equation and the many-body
problem, which is very useful for modeling and understanding how nanoscale
devices work. Several representative methods for simulation of quantum beha-
viors were described: the Hartree-Fock approximation, density functional theory,
tight-binding, the molecular dynamics approach, Monte Carlo techniques, and the
use of Green's functions. More information about the author and his research can
be found at the Microsystems and Nanotechnology Group at the University of
British Columbia, http://www.mina.ubc.ca/.
In addition to such devices, nanoscale computing offers revolutionary
paradigms of computation. Chapter 3 gave a history and discussion of quantum
computing. Quantum computing is a paradigm of computation that uses quantum
mechanics directly as the abstraction of computation. The chapter began by
discussing reversibility, quantum Turing machines, other quantum automata
models, and quantum gates and circuits. It then discussed quantum algorithms
that have been developed for various applications, including compression,
cryptography, Fourier transforms, factoring numbers, and search problems. It
also addressed the issue of error correction due to decoherence and the potential
of using distributed entanglement for a quantum computer. A variety of ways to
use physics to realize quantum computing was given, and the energy and volume
bounds for quantum computing were discussed. It turns out that volume bounds