IBM reveals carbon nanotube breakthrough

IBM has revealed a breakthrough in creating transistors using carbon nanotubes. They say it could revolutionise the way computers are made, and replace silicon. The carbon chips are set to be dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful. Silicon transistors, tiny switches that carry information on a chip, have been made smaller year after year, but […]

IBM has revealed a breakthrough in creating transistors using carbon nanotubes.
They say it could revolutionise the way computers are made, and replace silicon.
The carbon chips are set to be dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful.
Silicon transistors, tiny switches that carry information on a chip, have been made smaller year after year, but they are approaching a point of physical limitation.
With Moore’s Law running out of steam, shrinking the size of the transistor – including the channels and contacts – without compromising performance has been a vexing challenge troubling researchers for decades.
As devices become smaller, increased contact resistance for carbon nanotubes has hindered performance gains until now.
These results could overcome contact resistance challenges all the way to the 1.8 nanometer node – four technology generations away.
Carbon nanotube chips could greatly improve the capabilities of high performance computers, enabling Big Data to be analyzed faster, increasing the power and battery life of mobile devices and the Internet of Things, and allowing cloud data centers to deliver services more efficiently and economically.
Carbon nanotubes are a rolled-up form of graphene, which are somewhat similar to Silicon since they both have band gap and can be used as the center piece of the transistor – the channel.
Silicon transistors, tiny switches that carry information on a chip, have been made smaller year after year, but they are approaching a point of physical limitation.
With Moore’s Law running out of steam, shrinking the size of the transistor – including the channels and contacts – without compromising performance has been a vexing challenge troubling researchers for decades.