Nano on the News-Hour

On tonight's PBS show The NewsHour, there was a thought-provoking segment about how engineers at companies like Intel are re-designing computer chips using variations of nanoelectronics technology to make chips faster and more powerful. This is essentially the technology that I blogged on here earlier with the use of exotic materials like hafnium to improve performance.

As with the New York Times piece from last week about IBM's chip improvements, nanotechnology per se wasn't given a major role in the story. Toward the end of the piece, Sir James Fraser Stoddart's work on molecular electronics and the possible use of molecules as transistors was featured. However, the NewsHour did not discuss other areas such as spintronics.