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."

Comments

need more info?

[jayoyayo]

oddly enough, for more in depth information, check out the recorded answers they provide for integration into radio broadcasts.

Warrent some explanation

[lingqi]

nanotubes spontaneously combust when bright light is shone upon them.

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. =)

Re:Warrent some explanation

[mdielmann]

Note that this is only for single-walled nanotubes...here's an article about it...

Re:quantum entaglement

[wass]

Nanotubes actually have significant potential for quantum computing. Nanotubes are much more than just a carbon 'wire', they are a well-structured crystal with a number of symmetry groups that can be exploited for interesting solid-state effects.

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.

Re:This will take a while to seep down to home use

[kinnell]

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

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.

IBM pioneered Carbon Nanotubing

[olePigeon (Wik)]

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.

More info on their research on carbon tubes..

[cOdEgUru]

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!

That's all nice, but ...

[DaneelGiskard]

... 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...

Group IV elements

[AlpineR]

Good thought. The crystal structure of a silicon wafer is the same as a carbon diamond. Germanium, too, routinely grows in a diamond structure. But carbon also forms graphite, which is a sheetlike structure. Carbon nanotubes are essentially rolled up graphite sheets. But silicon and germanium are not stable in sheet structures, so they can't roll into nanotubes.

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

Not quite

[dcmeserve]

NASA has come up with a way to wire microchips with nanotubes instead of copper interconnects.

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.