Molecular computing: A layer of logic

Tag: Compound Organic

Silicon chips have thousands of electronic logic gates etched on them. But there are other ways to decorate monolithic surfaces with logic gates, as a system using metal complexes secured to glass slides shows.

Logic lies at the heart of modern computers1, and the components that carry out its operations are logic gates. On the basis of a number of digital inputs (the presence or absence of some condition conventionally represented as 1's or 0's), a logic gate produces a single digital output.

A. Prasanna de Silva is at the School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Queen's University, Belfast BT9 5AG, UK.