It isn't just making the wires and molecules themselves that needs more practice. With the new kind of circuits, developers will need new ways to design chips.
The team is evaluating the properties of molecules and creating a computer-simulation program to predict how they'll behave in different situations. That's the first step to understanding how they will react in strings of circuits.
Researchers also need new computer-based chip-design programs to create patterns for the actual chips that will use the technology. Because the circuits are so tiny, companies could put 100 billion of them on one chip; today's design software couldn't handle that many.
"We want to be sure when this comes together it's a real technology,'' Kuekes said. ``Two years ago, we never would have signed up for this. A lot of progress has been made. It hasn't been easy, but it's been easier than we thought. This is really physically possible.''
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