los circuitos integrados

Richard Feynman, considerado fundador de la nanotecnología, ya preveía las posibilidades en la miniaturización, manipulating and controlling things on a small scale en 1959.

Fue él (Feinmann) quien inspiro a investigadores y científicos hacia nuevos horizontes.

“Why cannot we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopedia Brittanica on the head of a pin?” enormous amounts of information can be carried in an exceedingly small space

I am telling you what could be done if the laws are what we think; we are not doing it simply because we haven’t yet gotten around to it.

I do know that computing machines are very large; they fill rooms. Why can’t we make them very small, make them of little wires, little elements—and by little, I mean little. For instance, the wires should be 10 or 100 atoms in diameter, and the circuits should be a few thousand angstroms across. Everybody who has analyzed the logical theory of computers has come to the conclusion that the possibilities of computers are very interesting—if they could be made to be more complicated by several orders of magnitude. If they had millions of times as many elements, they could make judgments. They would have time to calculate what is the best way to make the calculation that they are about to make. They could select the method of analysis which, from their experience, is better than the one that we would give to them. And in many other ways, they would have new qualitative features.

Yet there is no machine which, with that speed, can take a picture of a face and say even that it is a man; and much less that it is the same man that you showed it before—unless it is exactly the same picture. If the face is changed; if I am closer to the face; if I am further from the face; if the light changes—I recognize it anyway. Now, this little computer I carry in my head is easily able to do that. The computers that we build are not able to do that. The number of elements in this bone box of mine are enormously greater than the number of elements in our “wonderful” computers. But our mechanical computers are too big; the elements in this box are microscopic. I want to make some that are submicroscopic.

The information cannot go any faster than the speed of light—so, ultimately, when our computers get faster and faster and more and more elaborate, we will have to make them smaller and smaller.

But there is plenty of room to make them smaller.

There is nothing that I can see in the physical laws that says the computer elements cannot be made enormously smaller than they are now. In fact, there may be certain advantages.

When we get to the very, very small world—say circuits of seven atoms—we have a lot of new things that would happen that represent completely new opportunities for design. Atoms on a small scale behave like nothing on a large scale, for they satisfy the laws of quantum mechanics. So, as we go down and fiddle around with the atoms down there, we are working with different laws, and we can expect to do different things. We can manufacture in different ways. We can use, not just circuits, but some system involving the quantized energy levels, or the interactions of quantized spins, etc. Another thing we will notice is that, if we go down far enough, all of our devices can be mass produced so that they are absolutely perfect copies of one another.

Plenty of Room at the Bottom Richard P. Feynman (Dated: Dec. 1959)