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: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.