DNA-like Materials Could Open New Computing Frontiers

As computers have progressed over the last few decades, with their component transistors getting ever smaller and ever more numerous on a single chip, that relentless progress, famously described by Moore's Law, has begun to bump up against fundamental physical limits to what can be done with the present etched-lines-on-silicon technology. But now, a new twist involving an inorganic molecule that has a DNA-like helical shape may provide an alternative pathway that could shrink transistors down to atom-sized scales. And even DNA molecules themselves might ultimately become the bits and bytes and logic gates of the future.