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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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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.
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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
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
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.
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.
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