As Moore's Law nears its end, the upgrade of the manufacturing process becomes more and more difficult. Each upgrade means billions or even tens of billions of dollars of investment. At the same time, researchers and chip manufacturers are vigorously developing new computing technologies.
One potential possibility is molecular circuits, which are electronic devices and integrated circuits built at the molecular level. It can reduce the size of electronic devices to the molecular scale, break through the limit of silicon-based semiconductors, and promote the development of integrated circuits toward smaller sizes, lower energy consumption, and higher integration. Molecular circuits are one of the most focused directions in the post-Moore era.
Researchers recently reported a single-molecule "switch" that can function like a transistor and has the potential to store binary information, such as 1s and 0s used in classical calculations.