electrical power in nanomachines

From: Fred Chen (flipsu5_at_comcast.net)
Date: 09/11/04 

Date: 11 Sep 2004 16:29:04 GMT

Presumably in any nanomachine, electrical energy would be stored in a
very small capacitor, or a nanobattery.
 
The capacitance that could fit in a nanoelectrical device assuming a
permittivity of 10 x vacuum (e.g., aluminum oxide), area = 100 nm X 100
nm, gap = 10 nm, gives 8.85e-17 farad. At an operating voltage of 1V,
that means 553 electrons are stored when the battery is fully charged.
 
Electrical resistance goes as length/area, so it should be pretty high
for nanomachines generally. If we want RC to be on the order of 1000 s,
then the nanobattery's resistance will be on the order of 10^19 ohms.
The electrons will be trickling out.
 
If the nanomachine is supposed to multitask, an appropriate fraction of
the few hundred electrons must be allocated to each task. This would
make the current for each task even more noisy, or "chunky".
 
If we shrank all dimensions the same amount, the charge stored would
also shrink down the same amount, in Moore's Law fashion, aggravating
the noise issues. 10 nm X 10 nm X 1nm capacitors are definitely a
problem.
 
Again, I am leaning toward making such machines larger than a micron.
 
Fred

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