Tiny wires could usher new computer era

01-06-2012 • The RawStory.com

Scientists said Thursday they have designed tiny wires, 10,000 times thinner than a human hair but with the same electrical capacity as copper, in a major step toward building smaller, more potent computers.

The advance, described in the US journal Science, shows for the first time that wires one atom tall and four atoms wide can carry a charge as well as conventional wires.

That could lead to even tinier electronic devices in the future as well as new steps toward quantum computing, an industry still in its infancy which would create powerful computers that could sift through massive amounts of data faster than current digital computers which use binary code.

“Driven by the semiconductor industry, computer chip components continuously shrink in size allowing ever smaller and more powerful computers,” said researcher Michelle Simmons of the University of New South Wales, in Sydney, Australia.