A RUGGED organic molecule looks set to become the foundation stone for a new generation of organic electronic devices late next year.
In organic chips, large, space-hogging capacitors will be replaced with a layer of robust organic molecules that can store electric charge. This will allow chip makers to cram more megabytes of storage into a given area of chip.
Many organic molecules are fragile, however, and can鈥檛 withstand the harsh conditions a microchip must endure during its manufacture and use. Chips routinely reach temperatures of over 100 掳C during the manufacturing process, and even during operation in a computer can get as hot. Most organics are reduced to ash by such conditions, says David Bocian, a chemist at the University of California at Riverside. 快猫短视频s have tended to ignore the problem, he says, but 鈥渋f you鈥檙e going to take these molecules into a real chip fabrication plant, one of the first things people ask is how robust they are鈥�.
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So Bocian and his colleagues looked for molecules that are made of sterner stuff. In Science (vol 302, p 1543), they report that they have found molecules tough enough to survive half an hour at 400 掳C. The molecules, called porphyrins, are made of strings and rings of carbon atoms.
To make the molecules stick to the chip, Bocian鈥檚 team tweaked their chemical structure so that one end of each porphyrin molecule would bond to oxygen on the oxidised surface of the silicon chip.
Transistors embedded in the silicon can then shuttle charge into and out of the molecule to store a digital 0 or 1 鈥� just as they would charge up a capacitor in a conventional chip. Eliminating conventional capacitors makes room for even more transistors, so the amount of data that can be stored is doubled or tripled.
Around 10,000 porphyrin molecules sit above each transistor to form a memory cell. Eventually each porphyrin molecule could store a bit, boosting the data density even further. That鈥檚 some way off, but already Zettacore, a small start-up in Denver, Colorado, says that memory chips containing porphyrins could be on the market by this time next year.
