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

royalties

[TerraFrost]

with the money NASA can get off the patents for these, the space program may indeed have a future! :)

Re:royalties

[theRiallatar]

Riiiight. Keep on believing that. We're going to pay for "R&D" costs from companies making these products whether the government developed it or not. Prices are going to be outrageous when this stuff starts to hit the market regardless of how it was developed.

quantum entaglement

[astafas]

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.

Re:quantum entaglement

[addaon]

Well, in terms of keeping moore's law, clearly the evolutionary technology is preferred. One of the most obvious corollary of moore's law is that progress is continuous; revolutionary directly implies non-continuous, and it seems unlikely that the development of feasible quantum computers would lead to a keeping of moore's law, rather than a breaking of it in one direction or the other.

Re:NASA vs. Intel

[Tailhook]

Has Intel done anything this cool?

How about creating the first microprocessor? That cool enough for you?

This will take a while to seep down to home users

[Suchetha]

What NASA has done is to make a switch from copper connectors to carbon nanotube connectors within the chip and (maybe) the boards. but while this IS a revolutionary step it will be a LONG while until we see this kind of chip for sale in teh home market because :

• 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 all .. <toolman>more POW-er urrhh urrh urrh</toolman>
Suchetha