Molecular Scale Electronics - Problems - Commercialization

Commercialization

One of the biggest hindrances for single molecule electronics to be commercially exploited is the lack of techniques to connect a molecular sized circuit to bulk electrodes in a way that gives reproducible results. At the current state, the difficulty of connecting single molecules vastly outweighs any possible performance increase that could be gained from such shrinkage. The picture becomes even worse if the molecules are to have a certain spatial orientation and/or have multiple poles to connect.

Also problematic is the fact that some measurements on single molecules are carried out in cryogenic temperatures (close to absolute zero), which is very energy consuming. This is done to reduce signal noise enough to measure the faint currents of single molecules.