Posted on 05/20/2002 4:53:36 PM PDT by sourcery
NEW YORK, May 20 — International Business Machines Corp., the world’s largest computer maker, said on Monday it has built a transistor that outperforms today’s top silicon-based semiconductors and may be the key to smaller, faster computers.
ARMONK, NEW YORK-BASED IBM said it used a carbon nanotube — a tiny cylindrical structure made up of carbon atoms that is about 100,000 times thinner than a human hair — to make a transistor similar to today’s silicon-based electronic switches, or transistors.
The carbon nanotube transistor outperformed the fastest silicon transistor, IBM said, giving the company’s research division confidence that commercial microchips could one day be made out of carbon nanotube transistors.
When IBM first said last year it had made a tiny transistor based on nanotubes, it couldn’t show that a nanotube transistor could carry more than twice the electric current of a silicon transistor.
“The small (size) is of course very important, but it is a little bit overhyped. It is really the performance we are after,” said Phaedon Avouris, manager of nanoscience and nanotechnology for IBM Research.
Chips are used in everything from large corporate computers that run huge databases, to handheld computers, cell phones and toasters.
Scientists are looking for a replacement for silicon because in the next 10 to 15 years they expect it will no longer be possible to improve on chips using silicon, which would limit improvements in chip size and speed.
Under Moore’s law, named for Intel Corp. co-founder Gordon Moore, the number of transistors on a chip doubles every 18 months, resulting in a rough doubling of computing power.
In addition to looking at using the carbon nanotube, which is the strongest fiber in nature and 10 times stronger than steel, scientists are also studying the possibility of quantum computing based on atoms.
© 2002 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters.
I''ll go ahead and put this easy access script in here and ping some other folks!
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As an ex-chip maker of thirty years, I agree.
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