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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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with the money NASA can get off the patents for these, the space program may indeed have a future! :)
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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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.
Now Mr. Bowman is supposed to pull Hal's nanotube? That's a bit hard.
oddly enough, for more in depth information, check out the recorded answers they provide for integration into radio broadcasts.
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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...
Okay everybody you can LOOK at my new CPU, but what every you do, DON'T TAKE A PICTURE!!!
....shit....
*flash*
**POP**
:)
NASA doesn't have enough money to do space travel.
>Why don't NASA use their very limited amount of money for something acutally useful to Space travel.
Like what? I know! they could make smaller chips for their computers so they could have more onboard computing power without sacrificing having a few spares! oh wait, that probbly involves playing around with nano tech, whoops!
besides, they probbly raise funds this way...
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
- 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 allSuchetha
learn from yesterday, plan for tomorrow, party tonight
or one out of three ain't bad
I for one am confident that the media and marketing people will be sufficiently creative to keep people believing in the Moores law myth well into the 23rd century.
If I seem short sighted, it is because I stand on the shoulders of midgets
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 read it "NASA Wires Chimps With Nanotubes"
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've measured resistance of a nanotube of approx. 200 nm in length and about 5-10 nm in diameter to be a few hundred kilo-ohms (sorry, don't have exact numbers with me). This was for temperatures from room (300 K) down to about 2 K. We were looking at verifying some initial claims by groups claiming that nanotubes were superconducting. they aren't.
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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
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...
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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.
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.
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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!
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More than a million Amps in a cm^2?? If space applications in the future are gonna need currents of a million amps going down a wire that feeds under your vertical bed, I sure as hell won't be an astronaut! :-)
Just like the microwave, this is just yet another technological advancement made possible by Roswell.
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...
couldn't any atom in the valence group do as well? (I'm remembering my old chart of the elements and we could have silicon nanotubes too.)
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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
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
I call for an immediate ban on all future use of nanotubes by NASA. I don't care about the "performance increases" they claim. All I care about is the health effects of nanotechnology - this must be banned before it gets out of control!
/. article
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SpaceDaily reports that NASA has come up with a way to wire microchips with nanotubes instead of copper interconnects.
In other news, Intel's R&D department announced that mounting heatsink+fan on shuttles' thermal tiles can efficiently disspate heat during reentry into the Earth atmosphere.
Right now, the majority of space on chip is taken up by verious caches. A significant proportion of that space is taken up by wiring. Having much smaller wiring should allow much larger caches. A system with 8Mb on-chip cache (and a well-designed asynchronous algorythm for filling it) would hardly ever wait for the front-side-bus at all.
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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
Hyperthreading was built into the very first Pentium 4 (Willamette) processor, who's design started around 1994 (maybe 1995, I don't remember) under the codename P68. Regardless of when the design started, the first chip was released in what, 2000? That's well before Intel hired most of the Alpha team and got IP rights to Alpha technology.
Now, I'm not saying the Intel invented SMT (hyperthreading), but they didn't really just take it from Compaq either.
Most of the Intel inventions are either not disclosed (trade secret), or are modifications of existing technology to make it commercially feasible. Much of the process technology Intel adopts (or not adopts) is due to cost considerations, not just processor performance. Therefore, while IBM probably has technically better process technology, Intel has better yeilds (lower cost per processor).
Some "inventions" created by Intel include:
- the first microprocessor (4004)
- the first commercially used 2-level adaptive branch prediction (Pentium Pro) (invented with research done by Prof Yale Patt and his students)
- USB
- PCI
- AGP
- PCI Express (most of these buses were done by working groups headed by Intel)
- the first commercially used post-decode trace cache (Pentium 4)
- lot's of low power techniques with Pentium M
There are a lot more, but usually not public.
Dan
Ok, this is the same NASA that only uses 486's in shuttles?
Ad Astra Per Asper
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.
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