Recognising his work, the US based Foresight Institute offered in 1996 a $250,000 prize - the Feynman Grand Prize - to anyone who could design, construct, and demonstrate a robotic arm that initially fits into a cube no larger than 100nm and a computing device that fits into a cube no larger than 50nm and which can add any pair of 8bit binary numbers. The prize, as yet, remains unclaimed.
But work by a team from the University of California, Santa Barbara, could indicate the latter requirement is closer to being met. While the team says it hasn't made such a device yet, it has developed a design which could, if manufactured, match the brief.
Integral to the design - which also features memristors - is something called material implication logic, which appears to resemble in-memory processing in that computation results are stored in memory elements.
Only one thing remains for the UCSB group - making the device. To win the Foresight Prize, entrants need to submit 32 devices, along with design specifications and the theory of operation. But, of course, there's also the robotic arm …
