Quote:
Big Blue researchers feat suggests the material could be a candidate to replace silicon in chips.
IBM researchers have achieved a milestone by creating an integrated circuit out of a single carbon nanotube, a feat that makes the material a likely candidate to replace silicon as the main ingredient for making chips.
Big Blue plans to detail the accomplishment in the journal Science on Friday.
Long thought to be a good candidate for replacing silicon, carbon nanotube has posed great challenges for scientists who try to coax transistors out of the material and create an integrated circuit (IC). ICs are chips that process and store information in a variety of electronics devices, from computers to cell phones.
Creating carbon nanotube transistors has been done before, but figuring out a reliable way to assemble them to form an IC has stumped many bright minds. Wiring together transistors developed from a single carbon nanotube is an even more difficult task.
But the IBM research team did it. With an 18-micron long carbon nanotube, the scientists built a 10-transistor ring oscillator, a device typically constructed to test new manufacturing technologies or materials. Using one instead of many carbon nanotubes to build an IC reduces the manufacturing steps and therefore cost.
We were working on it for one tough year. said Joerg Appenzeller, an IBM researcher who worked on the project, which also involved researchers from the University of Florida and Columbia University in New York.
The feat will advance the engineering and manufacturing of carbon nanotube chips for the commercial market. Electrical current moves more freely and faster through carbon nanotube than silicon, making carbon nanotube a more energy-efficient material for a speedier chip. It also is super small. A nanometer is a billionth of a meter, and a carbon nanotube is 50,000 times thinner than a human hair.
All these properties make carbon nanotube an appealing candidate for improving performance by piling on more and smaller transistors on a chip without causing overheating.
But the material also is difficult to manipulate so that it develops uniformly during the chip-making process. More research will have to be done to figure out how to cheaply and efficiently make carbon nanotube chips that can outperform silicon chips.
Its a way off, said Fred Zieber, an analyst at Pathfinder Research, about commercializing carbon nanotube chips. It could be a few years or an eternity.
IBMs carbon nanotube IC is nearly a million times faster than previous ICs built with multiple carbon nanotubes. Even then, IBMs prototype clocks only at 50 megahertz. The fastest chip on the market today is a 3.8-gigahertz Pentium 4 by Intel.
Mr. Appenzeller wont even give his estimate of when carbon nanotube chips will be available for the commercial market. But he and his colleagues aim to build one in the gigahertz range, possibly within two years. The long-term goal is to build a terahertz chip.
Its like the first time we built a car, Mr. Appenzeller said. Now we know the obstacles, and we have ideas on how to improve it.
Nanotube chips will virtually eliminate the big obstacle for speed: heat. Now we just have to wait for the next great leap; silicon nanotubes, which are smaller than carbon nanotubes.
Sexy.
Hot.
Nice. Faster speed and less heat production sounds good.
Nanotube chips will virtually eliminate the big obstacle for speed: heat.
Recently, heat has only been an issue with Intel chips, and older ones at that. Newer, more efficient chips, such as the Pentium M and Core Duo, the forthcoming Conroe and AMD's offerings (especially the Turion64 and Athlon64), have pretty much eliminated the heat issue for the time being.
Also, this is about the fifth time in recent memory someone has come along and claimed that silicon is dead. Frankly, silicon is doing pretty well as it is, unless you consider the infamous Pentium 4 Prescott to be, like, the pinnacle of silicon tecnology.
Eventually we will hit the speed limit available to the current silicon semi-conductor technology, but that doesn't mean that computing power will no longer increase, or that new processes will emerge to go beyond the clockspeed barrier.
A 64 bit processor is more "powerful" than a 32 bit processor of the same speed. A dual core processor is more "powerful" than a single core processor of the same speed.
So while carbon nanotubes are promising, the whole field of nanotechnology has a LOT of growing up to do before this provides a viable alternative to silicone.
Of course. As the article states, this chip is like the first car.
It'll take a while to go from a Model T to a Mustang.
Very sexy.
Yeah, I heard of those little new chips as well.
I think it's a step forward and I also guess we can reach a lot if they are improved a bit.
I already looked on how such a chip should be built up.
Well, very complicating, I guess.
I tried to rebuilt something similiar with bigger parts, well....let's not talk about the result.
But nevertheless I hope we'll find an easier way soon.
Ah, Carbon. Is there anything it can't do?
