OREANDA-NEWS. Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. announces that it has successfully simulated the electrical properties of a 3,000-atom nano device – a threefold increase over previous efforts – using a supercomputer. At the nanoscale level, even minor differences in the local atomic configuration can have a major impact on the electrical properties of a device, requiring the first- principles method of calculation to be used to accurately compute physical properties at the atomic level. However, when applying this method to electrical property forecasting, the massive computations involved limit these forecasts to the order of 1,000 atoms.

Fujitsu Laboratories has now developed a calculation technique that reduces memory requirements while maintaining precision. Application at a 3000 atom scale have been made possible through a supercomputer using massively parallel processing. This technique enables the calculation of electrical properties, not only of individual nano device components, but of the interactions between these components. Expectations are that this development will contribute to faster practical implementations of nano devices. This simulation used massively parallel computing technology developed by the Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST) and the Computational Material Science Initiative (CMSI).

Details of this technology are being published in the January 14 edition of the Applied Physics Express (APEX), the letter journal of the Japan Society of Applied Physics.