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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! :)
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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I read it "NASA Wires Chimps With Nanotubes"
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
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.