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First Ever Nanotube Transistors On A Circuit

Posted by timothy on from the waiting-for-productization dept.

btsdev writes "Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley and Stanford University have developed the first ever integrated silicon circuit with nanotube technology. According to the article on UC Berkeley's site, this brings researchers one step closer to developing memory chips with carbon nanotubes - chips that could hold approximately 10,000 times more data than those we have today."

10 of 216 comments (clear)

  1. 10,000? by AvengerXP · · Score: 1, Insightful

    Take that Moore's Law.

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  2. What large memory you have! by ObviousGuy · · Score: 4, Insightful

    All the better to track you, my dear.

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  3. Diamond substrate? by Stile+65 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It'll be interesting to see how they'll make carbon nanotubes work when they use diamond for a semiconductor (see article in Wired, referenced by another /. post, that I'm too lazy to find now).

    Also, it'd be neat if they could base some kind of flash memory technology on this stuff too. I know IBM/HP/etc. are coming out with the polymer memory, but this stuff would probably be able to hold a lot more - a nice HD's worth of data in an SD card, at least. Or am I completely off base? Could that even completely replace hard drives eventually?

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  4. Crud... by Roadkills-R-Us · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I was hoping we finally had vacuum tubes grown on a chip. Besides building Eniac on a chip (but without the power bill and air conditioning problems) we could have every vacuum tube guitar amp ever made on a chip - just need a clean power amp after it.

    Fooey.

  5. We are needing speed, not capacity. by ircShot_guN · · Score: 4, Insightful

    At least in a server environment, I don't see the requirement for many gigs of memory (on a single chip no less) without also having better technology to access it quickly.

    1. Re:We are needing speed, not capacity. by Jesus+2.0 · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I guess I don't follow your reasoning.

      First of all, I would just plain love to have many gigs of memory, even if it's only accessible at today's speeds. To be able, for example, to actually search through my immense email archive at a reasonable speed, without needing to constantly fault to disk? Even if I have a whole movie loaded into memory and playing? Terrific.

      Second of all, access speed will, of course, improve with time. It is almost a tautology - technology improves. Especially with associated technological leaps forward to drive the need for it, such as is the case with what's discussed in the article.

  6. Re:Necessity? by Pyro226 · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Shamelessly quoted from http://peripherals.about.com/cs/buildyourpc/a/aa03 1215a_2.htm

    To understand how 64-bit technology gives your computer more RAM memory, you need to do a little math. Don't worry, it's easy math. Your computer's processor uses 8-bit blocks of memory (called bytes) in powers of 2. A 32-bit processor can address up to 2^32 bytes of RAM, or 4294967296 bytes. That's 4 gigabytes (a gigabyte is 2^30 bytes).

    Theoretically, 64-bit processors can use 2^64 bytes of RAM, or 18446744073709551616 bytes. That's 17179869184 gigabytes, or 16777216 terabytes (units of 2^40 bytes).

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  7. Well actually the second Nanotube Transistor. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    While this might be a great accomplishment it is a bit hard to tell from what was written. This is not the first carbon Nanotube transistor, but it might be the first to be integrated on silicon. This is not really important unless they have solved the principle problem with such devices, which is creating an ohmic contact. If there is not an ohmic contact the switching frequency (GHz) is massively limited making them useless.

  8. Carbon-based...machines?? by skidoo2 · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I think it's very interesting that as we get closer to being able to reproduce the capabilities of human intelligence, we consistently return to the basics of our 7th-grade Life Sciences classes (apologies for the American-centric illustration).

    Carbon, carbon, carbon....

    For (another) example, eyes are made of carbon.

  9. Re:Heat and carbon nanotubes... by Smidge204 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Did you even read the article you linked to? In order for that to happen, you need to fill a laundary list of rather specific criteria:

    1) Single walled nanotubes
    2) Presence of oxygen
    3) Temperatures in excess of 1,500 C
    4) Only intense light seems to effect it (photons are absorbed by the nanotubes directly)

    We can let #1 slide since I do not know if there is any specific requirement if nanotubes can (or must be) single or multi walled for use in electronics. Since there hasn't been any real development of nanotube electronics yet, I don't think anyone really knows. The linked article is about tool to analize nanotubes, not no much build electronic devices that incorperate them. It does make a good proof-of-concept though.

    #2 is easily remedied because the devices would be hermetically sealed in opaque packages. That also takes care of #4...

    And I don't think anyone will have to worry about the 1500 degree temperatures so far as electronics are concerned. At least nobody in the private sector...

    I mean damn, it's one thing to not RTFA, but you didn't even read your own sources!
    =Smidge=