Posted on 03/24/2006 1:36:37 AM PST by Straight Vermonter
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.
“It’s 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.”
IBM’s carbon nanotube IC is nearly a million times faster than previous ICs built with multiple carbon nanotubes. Even then, IBM’s prototype clocks only at 50 megahertz. The fastest chip on the market today is a 3.8-gigahertz Pentium 4 by Intel.
Mr. Appenzeller won’t 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.
“It’s 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.”
:-)
WOW!
Welcome aboard!
"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."
Now, where did I put those 20,000 transistors? They were right here a second ago.
"Actually, we are reaching the limitation of silicone technology as we us it today.
Not quite yet. :-) 45 nm is on the way."
How long have we heard the "reaching the limits of silicon technology" line? 15 years, 20 years?
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