Ferrocenes as potential building blocks for molecular electronics

Information in all its different forms is obviously an omnipresent aspect of modern life . The advances in information storage, processing and manipulation have propelled our society into the information age and made the world a “global village” with wireless broadband communication, internet companies, and information processing devices in everybody’s hand. These considerable changes in the last few decades have been driven by the evolution of information technology . The integrated circuit and the modern microprocessor started their technological revolution with the principles of von Neumann, 1945 [1] and the invention of the transistor by Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain in 1948 [2]. Highly specialized computing machines the size of small houses gradually turned into powerful hand-held devices for everyday use and will evolve further into smaller and more powerful devices, creating an environment with ambient intelligence . The task of finding information about a specific subject has changed into the task of selecting relevant information from the huge amount of data available anytime . This technical evolution proceeding at an unparalleled pace continuously demands for more processing power, additional storage capacity and new smart concepts, extending the range and intelligence of the systems . In the future, the interdiffusion of the information sphere and the real world in the form of more and more people spending time in purely virtual space, as well as robots, smart sensors and actuator systems interacting with reality, will continue the demand for processing power.