Inventor James Tour a professor of chemistry at Rice University won the Foresight Institute Feynman Prize for developing a car that is just four nanometers across and slightly wider than a strand of DNA. Tour’s nanocar car has a pivoting suspension, rotating axles attached to wheels, and even an engine!

The nanocar is able to move by using light or heat. When the surface that the cars are on is heated it excites the molecules that make up the car and as a reaction the nanocar moves forward until ultimately it hit’s an object. The light method works on the principle of Photoactivation.

Tour hopes that within the next 30 years his technology could construct quantum-dot memory which string together metal atoms in patterns that could then store data.

“Until now, engineers have built things by taking larger objects and cutting them down to make smaller ones,” Tour said. “In the future, things will be built not from the top down, but the bottom up -- as in nature.”

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Roughly every 18 months transistors get smaller but at the same time also increase in processing power. It was Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore in particular who predicted in 1965 that the number of transistors that can fit on a processor would roughly double every two years or so. Today this growth occurs every 18 months. But this exponential growth is not indefinite; there will be a time when the laws of quantum physics prevent any further shrinkage using conventional methods. And this is where atomic-scale computing comes into play with an essentially different solution to the problem.

“Nanotechnology is about taking something and shrinking it to its smallest possible scale. It’s a top-down approach,” says Christian Joachim of the (CNRS).

Using devices such as the scanning-tunnelling microscopes and atomic-force microscopes both devices which can measure and move individual atoms Joachim’s team has managed to design a simple logic gate with 30 atoms that perform the same task as 14 transistors. More?

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