Is drawing near:

Researchers at IBM's Almaden Research Center in California developed a technique for measuring magnetic anisotropy, a property of the magnetic field that gives it the ability to maintain a particular direction. Being able to measure magnetic anisotropy at the atomic level is a crucial step toward the magnet representing the ones or the zeroes used to store data in binary computer language.

In a second report, researchers at IBM's lab in Zurich, Switzerland, said they had used an individual molecule as an electric switch that could potentially replace the transistors used in modern chips. The company published both research reports in Friday's edition of the journal Science.

Wonder what the implications of this technology are for Moore's Law?

[Update a few minutes later]

Howard Lovy (who is back to blogging on nanotech again) has some thoughts on the paucity of imagination in reporting these things.

That seems like old news. I remember back in the late 90's attending a nanotech conference, and some university researchers had single molecule AND gates and OR gates. They were still working on XAND and XOR, but even those seem to have been solved since then.

Perhaps IBM is just getting closer to mass production of multiple gates. Whatever the case: Bring it on!

The problem isn't really making a single gate, out of molecules or whatever. It's reliably and cheaply making a billion gates on a single substrate. When you think about it, the ability of IC fabs to make astronomical numbers of transistors, and have a good chance of having all of them on a chip work, is nothing short of stunning.