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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."
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oddly enough, for more in depth information, check out the recorded answers they provide for integration into radio broadcasts.
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technically speaking they can patent it and license the technology or make it public domain.
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 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 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.
I know some folks trying to make qubits out of nanotubes by patterning gates on them. Very very hard, they're so damn small standard lithography techniques are out the window.
Nanotubes also have interesting phonon characteristics that make them good candidates for qubit systems. Also, it has been demonstrated that spin-orbit coupling in nanotubes can be drastically reduced, which can greatly enhance coherence times for spintronic qubits.
So, if Intel or NASA is "only" looking at using these guys for interconnects, carbon nanotubes still have significant potential for revolutionary computing breakthroughs.
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
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.
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
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...
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
You are mistaken. According to the IRS (who should know), in 2001 individual income tax accounted for over $1 trillion in revenue. Corporate income taxes accounted for less than $200 billion.
Hey kids, there's only 5 days left 'til Yak Shaving Day!
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
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