Izhar Medalsy, Michael Klein, Arnon Heyman, Oded Shoseyov, F. Remacle, R. D. Levine and Danny Porath

PUBLISHED ONLINE: 18 APRIL 2010 | DOI: 10.1038/NNANO.2010.62
NATURE NANOTECHNOLOGY | ADVANCE ONLINE PUBLICATION | www.nature.com/naturenanotechnology 1© 2010

A Set–Reset machine is the simplest logic circuit with a built-in memory. Its output is a (nonlinear) function of the input and of the state stored in the machine’s memory. Here, we report a nanoscale Set–Reset machine operating at room temperature that is based on a 5-nm silicon nanoparticle attached to the inner pore of a stable circular protein. The nanoparticle–protein hybrid can also function as a balanced ternary multiplier. Conductive atomic force microscopy is used to implement the logic input and output operations, and the processing of the logic Set and Reset operations relies on the finite capacitance of the nanoparticle provided by the good electrical isolation given by the protein, thus enabling stability of the logic device states. We show that the machine can be cycled, such that in every successive cycle, the previous state in the memory is retained as the present state. The energy cost of one cycle of computation is minimized to the cost of charging this state.