An Extension of Microelectronic Technology to Nanoelectronics

by Gianfranco Cerofolini Nanotechnology E-Newsletter, September 2005 The preparation of integrated circuits (ICs) on the 100Gbit integration scale may be possible with modest changes in current production process and marginal investment in fabrication facilities. We hypothesize an IC with a hybrid architecture: a standard silicon-based microelectronic section that controls a nanoscopic crossbar structure. At each cross point, the latter will host a collection of several functional molecules, each able to mimic the behavior of a flash memory cell. In this way, the hybrid circuit consists of a nanoscale kernel linked to a conventional submicron circuitry. Read more