"We really have a period of momentous development in molecular-scale electronics," said Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, a pioneer in molecular electronics.
You cannot do this with electronics," says Luca Cardelli of Microsoft's research centre in Cambridge, England, where the software giant is developing tools for designing molecular circuits.Technology Quarterly What happened to the flying car?
"Nothing that 3M does is about electronics," says Mr King.
"It's going to be cute little laboratory experiments," James M. Tour, professor of chemistry and a molecular electronics researcher at Rice University, said of work using DNA.
"This is the holy grail of opto-electronics," says HP's Ishak.
On the other hand, as Dr Williams points out, with terabits of storage available, it may never be necessary to erase anything.HP says that its molecular electronics will take a minimum of five years to commercialise.
Although critics have questioned nanoscientists' potential to turn out products soon (Science, 24 October, p.556), Cees Dekker, a biophysicist and molecular electronics expert at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, says the new studies underscore that basic research in molecular electronics remains vibrant.
"People in Silicon Valley view this as off the fringe," said James Ellen, a molecular electronics researcher at the Mitre Corporation.
That ability, Levy and others say, could lead to breakthroughs in solar cells, molecular electronics, sensors, light-emitting displays, and other technologies.
Dr. James C. Ellenbogen, the principal investigator of the nanoelectronic computers project at the Mitre Corporation in McLean, Va., and a pioneer in molecular electronics, called the work "one of the key missing ingredients" in efforts to build molecular electronic devices.
