Slashdot Mirror
NASA Wires Chips With Nanotubes
carstene writes "SpaceDaily reports that NASA has come up with a way to wire microchips with nanotubes instead of copper interconnects. Aparently this could keep Moore's law a reality well into the next decade."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
with the money NASA can get off the patents for these, the space program may indeed have a future! :)
Just wondering - but how much would NASA have spent to find this out? I mean It's common to see companies like IBM come up with stuff that is cool like this (like the copper idea a few years back). It seems to me that Intel doesn't actually come up with too many new ideas? (I mean sure there chips become faster but not amazing new things).
I could be wrong. Has Intel done anything this cool? Surely they would spend more money on R&D for processors (I would assume NASA spends more on Space?)
any info about this would be much appreciated.
My blog [.net, rants, general IT]
What interested me more, was that at the bottom of the article, it mentions that we have quantum entanglement of 3 electrons working. I don't know what will be more useful to continue Moore's Law, the nanotubes or the quantum computers. The nanotubes seem to be an evolutionary upgrade where the quantum computers seem to be more revolutionary.
Now Mr. Bowman is supposed to pull Hal's nanotube? That's a bit hard.
oddly enough, for more in depth information, check out the recorded answers they provide for integration into radio broadcasts.
WANT INFO ON A COUNTRY?
Oh, I'd say that they conduct somewhere around "more than a million amperes of current in a one square centimeter area without any deterioration". Direct quote from the article...
I agree. We've been hearing of alternatives to silicon forever. Quit bragging about weird little nano-playthings you piece together with STEMs and show me the chips!
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Okay everybody you can LOOK at my new CPU, but what every you do, DON'T TAKE A PICTURE!!!
....shit....
*flash*
**POP**
:)
NASA doesn't have enough money to do space travel.
>Why don't NASA use their very limited amount of money for something acutally useful to Space travel.
Like what? I know! they could make smaller chips for their computers so they could have more onboard computing power without sacrificing having a few spares! oh wait, that probbly involves playing around with nano tech, whoops!
besides, they probbly raise funds this way...
Has someone turned up the stupid on /. today or have my comment filters reset..?
Some Nanotubes are excellent conductors and some are poor conductors - depends on the tube type. So far it has proven difficult to grow only one kind of tube.
The way out may be a redundancy - several tubes doing the same function.
Maybe they can use them in vertical connections - for stacking chips up - one onto another, with nanotubes connecting the layers. But the overheating of such compact assemblies would be problem.
I doubt that we will ever figure out - and I suspect that even if we did figure out we couldn't do much about it
- there are very few companies who are geared for this kind of manufacturing since everyone so far has been using copper for the past umpteen years
- changing over to this kind of manufacturing will be a massive capital investment for a company, especially the companies in the East (asia not new york) where are a lot of these chips/boards are made
- there are AFAIK no companies that make nanotubes in sufficient quantity and quality to feed the demand for the tubes at the moment
- unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want (internet/email/minor word processing) this kind of tech will only benefit the "Power User" community..
that said i should add that this is a pretty cool tech.. and i hope it works out.. after allSuchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
I for one am confident that the media and marketing people will be sufficiently creative to keep people believing in the Moores law myth well into the 23rd century.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
this kind of tech will only benefit the "Power User" community
That sounds kinda familiar... it gets said every time something new comes out. 2 years later, everyone has it.
I think it was discovered at RPI.
AFAIK Oxygen is necessary for this combustion to take place, so your chips would be safe.
But in the end nobody really knows.
p.s. this has serious implications on the space-elevator, if y'all havn't thought about it already. =)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
I read it "NASA Wires Chimps With Nanotubes"
Maybe if the nanotubes' conduction/size ratio is good enough, they could be used as heat-pipes within the chip itself.
(\(\
(^.^)
(")")
*beware the cute-bunny virus
I don't remember nanotubes being excellent conductors (there are not so many free-floating electrons, so resistance is not as low as other materials), however, for the size they can handle a LOT of current. Because the atomic structure is so strong (this also contributes to the tensile strength), large quantities of electrons flowing does not "knock" atoms from their stable positions off, which would cause serious problems (silicon and copper both are exhibiting this troublesome behavior, and will be more problematic as transisters continue to shrink).
However, there has been recent research that suggest carbon compounds (diamond was it?) can be made to superconduct. It was from Africa, methinks? If that was really possible, nanotubes may have hope.
I would personally think the next big thing should be joseph-junction based (SQUID) computers, which would REALLY kick butt. (natural resonance frequency of 500GHz!)
My life in the land of the rising sun.
NASA spends billions of dollars on a failed space station... No wait they already are doing that.
I've measured resistance of a nanotube of approx. 200 nm in length and about 5-10 nm in diameter to be a few hundred kilo-ohms (sorry, don't have exact numbers with me). This was for temperatures from room (300 K) down to about 2 K. We were looking at verifying some initial claims by groups claiming that nanotubes were superconducting. they aren't.
make world, not war
That's completely untrue. For most of the history of the semiconductor industry, aluminium has been used, because the manufacturing process for copper was much more difficult. Copper has only recently become commonplace.
changing over to this kind of manufacturing will be a massive capital investment for a company, especially the companies in the East (asia not new york) where are a lot of these chips/boards are made
Changing to new manufacturing processes is a fact of life in the semiconductor industry and happens regularly. It always requires massive capital investment, yet somehow, they seem to manage (see above).
there are AFAIK no companies that make nanotubes in sufficient quantity and quality to feed the demand for the tubes at the moment
There are also no companies which manufacture nano scale copper wires for routing layers on ICs. This is because it's not done that way. Once you have a process for growing carbon nano-tubes on chips, you just have make it cost effective - just like any other semiconductor manufacturing technology.
unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want (internet/email/minor word processing) this kind of tech will only benefit the "Power User" community..
There's no amount of processing power that the desktop software industry will not be able to squander.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
Ahem...
...
People saying "unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want (internet/email/minor word processing) " are forgetting that
1 - Starting Word 2024 will require 1.5 TeraFlops because every key you strike will require the calculation of two 8192 bytes key and the exchange of 1024 security tokens / sec, and we have to get ready to cope with that
2 - My old and faithfull Dual PIII 1Ghz, that was once considered the fastest rig on my block is now just a piece of interesting junk that still allows me to play Quake and encode divxs at the same time, and LOTS of you just dream about doing it for real
3 - it's not because i'm not a basic luser that immediatly jump categories and becomes a Power User. And if you think a softcore gamer or a hardcore Quaker is a "Power User", you never saw a real 16 CPU machine being "stability tested" for a round or ten of Quake @1024 fps, or the fastest Divx encode ever (11 minutes 8p)...
4 - "internet/email/minor word processing" can be achieved since 486 DX2 66 with no problem and little fuss... I mean my mail Server/Firewall/Ftp/ Webserver/PDC is a Pentium 133 and it serves the need of 10 ppl...So stop complaining when we allow you the use of a 2 Ghz computer just so you can play Freecell @ 25 fps 8p
Would be BOFH, hoping for Admin job...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
As reported in the April 27 (2001) issue of the journal Science, IBM researchers have built the world's first array of transistors out of carbon nanotubes -- tiny cylinders of carbon atoms that measure about 10 atoms across, are 500 times smaller than today's silicon-based transistors and are 1,000 times stronger than steel. The breakthrough bypasses the slow process of manipulating individual nanotubes one-by-one, and is more suitable for a future manufacturing process. Story is here.
How could a smaller faster computer chip possibly get people to mars faster (for example)? I know! they will use their super nano tech powers to propel the rocket through space at the speed of light.
But if that was true, they would have a superconductor.
I highly doubt that, then the headline on the article would be very, very different. I guess they mean "any deterioration, we could (care to) measure".
TC - My Photos..
Well, it seems they are using multi-wall nanotubes
with rather large number of shells. Then you can
pass enough current to blow out all semiconducting
shells and get a metallic conductor. I don't
know if they use this trick but that's what IBM
people have done a while back.
The real trick is positioning these nanotubes
and contacting them. I wonder what they do to
assure good electrical contact. Typically your
contacts will be the first to blow out and the
thing to limit electronic mobility. Plus
encasing the nanotubes in silica sounds like a
bad idea because these suckers are really
sensitive to external perturbations and may not
conduct as well under external stress.
How about through advanced modelling of potential designs for said rocket. Modelling of fuel. Course plotting / corrections. I'm sure some actual rocket scientists could add more...
Faster, smaller, lighter computers are usefull for spacetravel. Just because they sendt a man to the moon with an onboard computer with less calculating power than a cheap pocket calculator and a weight of about 70 lbs (in addition to the 17.5 lbs DSKY) don't means that we should be satisfied with that sort of perfomance in the future.
BTW, more info on the Apollo guidance computer can be found at "One Giant Leap: The Apollo Guidance Computer" for those interested.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
Couldn't we all just move to Seattle and drink Starbucks instead? The cost of living is high enough, and the cups are tiny enough that I think it would be almost the same.
We can't use nanotech! It'll be toxic and dangerous to breath in!
:(
:(
WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT SNIFF YOUR CHIPS!
So much for enjoying the new computer smell.
Google points to here
Also the interview mentions the fact that in October 2002, it was still in basic research form and could take as much as a couple of years to production and maybe a bit more for commercial purposes.
But that still bodes well for us since Silicon will tide us through another 10 good years.
Wish I werent 30 right now. The average lifespan looking like 70 (hopefully!) I just have 40 more years left....oopss.. Panic Attack!
Rapid Nirvana
More than a million Amps in a cm^2?? If space applications in the future are gonna need currents of a million amps going down a wire that feeds under your vertical bed, I sure as hell won't be an astronaut! :-)
These guys are looking for 180,000 KM of the stuff, I wonder can the get it here.
Oh and the need a big rock to tie it to as well....
--My sig is bigger than your sig--
Just like the microwave, this is just yet another technological advancement made possible by Roswell.
This led to their creation of "pixie dust" which has enabled notebook hard drive capacities to rise. They found unique magnetic properties of "glass" when manipulating compounds on a molecular level.
Yell & scream & rant & rave... it's no use... you need a shaaaave ~ Bugs Bunny
... processors are not the bottleneck in any way. They are already so fast that buses, caches and memory have a very hard time to keep up, not speeking about secondary or even tertiary memory at all. That's the real bottleneck these days, the buses to the caches and the caches/memory itself. Most of you know how many processor cycles are lost if some data cannot be pulled out of the cache, but must be pulled out of the memory or even the harddisk (we are speaking about millions of ns's here...).
So I'd like to see some evolutionary/revolutionary inventions in these sectors, rather than making cpu's even faster and making the bottleneck of buses, caches and memories even larger...
Research into totally new technologies like quantum computing will be delayed because of this.
;-)
When chip makers reach the cealing of current technology, only then large amounts of cash and effort will be pumped into totally new technologies.
In other words: this piece of innovation slows down more interresting innovation.
Ack, every up-side has its down-side(s)
couldn't any atom in the valence group do as well? (I'm remembering my old chart of the elements and we could have silicon nanotubes too.)
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
at least that is what I think of when I see "NASA." Could this be a small start for them catching a clue and coming out of the bureaucratic pit of incompetence they have been in?
Imagine a railgun made of carbon nanotubes
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
So at that price, they might earn money on this research that results in a few less needed pounds per launch...
(And yes, that is a sad, sad joke -- I know the shuttle computers are from the 80's, or something.)
Karma: Excellent (My Karma? I wish...:-( )
This is fantastic. Is there nothing Tiny Carbon Nano Tubes can not do ? I belive that Tiny Carbon Nano Tubes will change all our lives in ways we can not imagine.
However, intense research of carbon is what led to the discovery of buckyballs and nanotubes. Perhaps there other cool forms of silicon which are yet to be discovered.
On a different topic, how do the NASA researchers propose to connect the nanotubes in a useful way? I can understand growing the tubes on a silicon wafer and filling in the surrounding space, but this just produces a bunch of parallel wires not a designed circuit.
AlpineR
Those nanotubes burned when exposed to bright light, but researchers might find an alternate nanotube structure that doesn't absorb light like that.
So the chips and the space elevator might be ok.
It seems to me that we could extend Moore's Law (observation) for another 7 years just by switching from copper and electron based bit transfer methods to fiber and light based bit transfer. Just like we went from copper telephone wires to fiber. Since electrons only travel at 1/10 the speed of light, we could theoretically have optical computers with FSB speeds of 8ghz! (quad pumped double data rate of course) That could hold us over until quantum computing arrives.
Yes, perhaps they promise less resistance than copper interconnect of the same size, but isn't a diameter of 100nm actually a bit large? Can nanotubes shrink, or is their diameter a chemical requirement? According to the International Technology Roadmap for Semiconductors, copper wiring pitch should now in 2003 already be 245nm. So with 50% spacing between those nanotubes, you're not even talking a 2x improvement in size over current interconnect. What if the things are too big to be used as interconnect for those 35nm gates we're supposed to see in 2007?
Who do you get to be an expert to tell you something's not obvious? The least insightful person you can find? -J Roberts
I call for an immediate ban on all future use of nanotubes by NASA. I don't care about the "performance increases" they claim. All I care about is the health effects of nanotechnology - this must be banned before it gets out of control!
/. article
-Crazy researcher from other recent
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
Also, as I recall, the major problem with using nanotubes in this way is going to be getting a number of them with similar characteristics. So far, no one's been able to get a good handle on how to really tailor properties finely (length, twist angle, etc).
But one day, perhaps.
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
SpaceDaily reports that NASA has come up with a way to wire microchips with nanotubes instead of copper interconnects.
In other news, Intel's R&D department announced that mounting heatsink+fan on shuttles' thermal tiles can efficiently disspate heat during reentry into the Earth atmosphere.
Right now, the majority of space on chip is taken up by verious caches. A significant proportion of that space is taken up by wiring. Having much smaller wiring should allow much larger caches. A system with 8Mb on-chip cache (and a well-designed asynchronous algorythm for filling it) would hardly ever wait for the front-side-bus at all.
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
False. Most improvements in processor design and fabrication have allowed processors to be made that are faster, smaller, and cheaper. Perhaps there aren't many users who care about faster, but everyone cares about smaller and cheaper.
unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want
This won't stay true forever, though.
My PII-400 is about 3 1/2 years old now, two generations old in Moore's Law terms, and it is indeed fast enough for most of what I do.
However.
If I try to play movie files using certain late-model codecs (MPEG-4 f'rinstance), I get jerky playback and poor A/V synchronization -- the processor just can't keep up with decoding the data streams in realtime.
Software bloat shows no signs of abating either, for better or worse. I bet that most people won't be satisfied with the performence of Windows XP 2005 on their 1.5GHz machines of today.
Thanks for the article reference...
-Zipwow
I don't know which is more depressing, that 2/3 didn't care enough to vote, or that 1/2 of those that did are crazy.
They're ballistic conductors. There are theoretically no losses in the nanotubes themselves. However, there better be some good contacts or the thing will blow.
Metallic single-walled nanotubes have a theoretical contact resistance of ~6.5kohms. What this means is that there are no losses within the nanotube itself, just when current moves from the nanotube to some other material.
there are AFAIK no companies that make nanotubes in sufficient quantity and quality to feed the demand for the tubes at the moment
yes, this is true. However, if you took the time to read the article you would read that the process described grows the nanotubes in place (using a chemical process).
unless you are a gamer home computers are more than fast enough now for what we want (internet/email/minor word processing) this kind of tech will only benefit the "Power User" community..
yes, this is true. However, in the future everybody will be a gamer. Everybody wants immersive VR, whether they realize it or not. All you have to do is dangle a superintelligent earpiece in front of people, and they will *want* one. Don't give me some bullshit about how 3 GHz should be enough for anybody.
Magic self healing server pixie dust!
=Smidge=
yeah, that value didn't include contact resistance. but there are losses in the tube itself. carriers aren't purely ballistic (maybe theoretically but not in our samples). We also couldn't be certain if we truly had single-walled tubes, they could have been ropes. Whether metallic or semiconducting can be determined by noting R decreasing at low T.
make world, not war
Hyperthreading was built into the very first Pentium 4 (Willamette) processor, who's design started around 1994 (maybe 1995, I don't remember) under the codename P68. Regardless of when the design started, the first chip was released in what, 2000? That's well before Intel hired most of the Alpha team and got IP rights to Alpha technology.
Now, I'm not saying the Intel invented SMT (hyperthreading), but they didn't really just take it from Compaq either.
Most of the Intel inventions are either not disclosed (trade secret), or are modifications of existing technology to make it commercially feasible. Much of the process technology Intel adopts (or not adopts) is due to cost considerations, not just processor performance. Therefore, while IBM probably has technically better process technology, Intel has better yeilds (lower cost per processor).
Some "inventions" created by Intel include:
- the first microprocessor (4004)
- the first commercially used 2-level adaptive branch prediction (Pentium Pro) (invented with research done by Prof Yale Patt and his students)
- USB
- PCI
- AGP
- PCI Express (most of these buses were done by working groups headed by Intel)
- the first commercially used post-decode trace cache (Pentium 4)
- lot's of low power techniques with Pentium M
There are a lot more, but usually not public.
Dan
Ok, this is the same NASA that only uses 486's in shuttles?
Ad Astra Per Asper
From the article:
...'growing' microscopic, whisker-like carbon nanotubes...
:)
My wife has been doing this in our bed room for years
Could we hook up pressurized air and make a complex web of pneumatic tubes? We could send actual packets of stuff all over the computer.
But if you got a virus on such a device (like SARS), your computer might start coughing.
I can see Motorola trying to add carbon nanotubes to the 68000 (ahem, *Dragonball*) and try to convince Palm to switch back to the platform for the latest Tungstens... Or the Bitmap Brothers making yet another vaporware announcement of their upcoming graphics chipset using carbon nanotubes in the race to beat nvidia and ATI on paper and HTML based content (fan sites).
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
Why didn't I think of that? Duh!
(slaps forehead)
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
Not quite: it's not the *wire routing* that is being implemented with nanotubes here. Rather, as indicated rather subtly in the article, it is only *vias* -- i.e. the interconnect between layers of metal on the chip. It's a crucial piece of the puzzle, but still limited in scope. The limitations of the copper wires will still dominate.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
If you read the article closely, you'll see it's not talking about about replacing all copper interconnect on the chip -- only a small portion, in fact: the vias. The carbon nanotube are being used only for the interconnect between metal layers, not between devices on the chip in general.
"Orthodoxy is unconsciousness" - Orwell
Apparently, NASA botched the metric conversion and the nano tubes are actually 6 inches across.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...