A route to the fabrication of electronic devices is provided, in which the devices
consist of two crossed wires sandwiching an electrically addressable molecular
species. The approach is extremely simple and inexpensive to implement, and scales
from wire dimensions of several micrometers down to nanometer-scale dimensions.
The device of the present invention can be used to produce crossbar switch arrays,
logic devices, memory devices, and communication and signal routing devices. The
present invention enables construction of molecular electronic devices on a length
scale than can range from micrometers to nanometers via a straightforward and inexpensive
chemical assembly procedure. The device is either partially or completely chemically
assembled, and the key to the scaling is that the location of the devices on the
substrate are defined once the devices have been assembled, not prior to assembly.
