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First Ever Nanotube Transistors On A Circuit
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."
I guess this means the Ferengi do not have to abduct Seven of Nine after all.
Rosco: "If brains were gunpowder, Enos couldn't blow his nose."
Berkley has made some great stuff over the years. But this is truly cool. You could make a supercomputer the size of your current computer tower today. Or maybe even smaller with some other control method.
Or even maybe implant it in your body.
All the better to track you, my dear.
I have been pwned because my
Let's see.
1. I'd like to see a bewolf cluster of these.
2. How long until it runs linux?
3.
I think that covers it all. You may proceed.
Feel free to contribute.
clifgriffin > blog
If you could get lots of small chips to give high memory density, pack them into a PC and then setup a huge RAM disk with some permanent storage things would suddenly become a lot faster
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
stuck under your fingernails!!
well just wait till they pop one of these into an iPod you be able to store like 1 million songs. on that thing.
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Ummmm. There is a pretty serious problem with heat dissapation and CARBON nanotubes Like this report shows
Isnt this going to cause a pretty serious problem in integrating nanotube technology into electronics ?
One step closer!
We can rebuild him. We have the technology.
So do these things have good tensile strength if you pack them in bundles? Because when they rebuild me, I want them to use nanotubes. They're definitely the "in" thing right now. Just imagine...legs that can literally "remember."
Damon,
http://actionPlant.com
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?
I claim first use of "Error No. 0B" - or "No. 0B error." It'll be the new ID 10T!
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.
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.
Ok, if you have 10,000 more the space, it all disappears when you power off right? Or when the power goes out?
Also what about address space?
How many bit CPUs will we need to address 1,280,000MB of RAM?
Nonetheless cool, even though it seems either overkill or impractical
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I always wanted a Marshall tube stack I could carry in my pocket!!!!!
Not that I can see why anyone would ever need more than 640 TB anyways. Except people still using MS Windows and MS Office, of course. Sheesh!
Ooops, wrong timeline. 'Scuse me while I duck back, er... forwards, to 2014 again.
And remember kids: Never trust a computer you can actually lift.
"What the hell's this... some kinda nanotube?!"
The neutrality of this sig is disputed.
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.
In 1995, there was alot of talk about a glass cube that can store a terabyte of data. This technology was expected to be around the market by 2005. Where is it now?
Exactly. Like 90% of the great technical innovations they either don't make it for political reasons. Or heavily delayed for an eternity. Scary part is, Doom III will probably come out after this stuff.
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.
Finally a good use for all this stupid carbon! Get out of the atmosphere and into my computer!
Slashdot user? yes? That's good. Then there's little chance of any body cavity being, as you put it, "bumped."
grammar-lesson free since 1999. (rescinded - 2005)
I have been hearing about that thing about this new m$ os that will be fast and you will be able to open more apps, now i see how!!, just take windoze, an old version obviously, XP would be still to heavy, say, NT 3.51, and run it in a machine with about 50 Gb of ddr, and if you add it proper fast scsi disks so it can swap out all the time, and there you go!, you just got unix like performance on a windowish os!!!, ups, well we still has to get ride of that bsod, we'r working on it guys :)
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
And people these days think that Fossil Fuels are the result of a few million years of pressure and heat transforming Dead Trees.
In fact all these "fossil fuels" we keep burning are the decomposition of a once well-known and essentially pervasive vastly superior technology. Technology which we're only now beginning to open the doors to.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
My prediction is that the first high-tech consumer product implants will be cell phones. But this does raise interesting questions about producing reasonably sized implant electronics for blind and deaf people, as well as other human systems failures.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
1: Vastly more memory at much cheaper prices.
-or-
2: Such draconian DRM/DMCA/**AA lawsuits/Product Activation woes/SCO lawsuits/stupid Congressional actions and the like such that there is nothing left to put in said memory.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
For a RISC cpu, each word contains an instruction. The address is embeded inside that instruction. With 64bits, this leaves you with a 22bit command and a 42 bit address. The maximum memory addressed is then 2^42 bytes - or four terabytes.
The advantage of doing it this way is that the entire memory space can be addressed in a single instruction - no complex addressing schemes are required. Simple is good.
You don't belive me - check the literature on the G5, located here. (See page 7)
does the 150,000 Gig iPod come out?
Just in time! They are going to need some serious capacity to store HQ images of fingerprints belonging to millions of the world's terrorists.
until they can encode the human genome in something close to the size of the human genome?
Information on the Caltech research can be found here.
Just thought I'd point out that CNT makes a horrible acronym. No wonder materials engineers can't get dates, going on about all the really tight CNTs they're growing in the lab...
At least, they're not laying claim to it (though you can bet they would like to). Their more modest (!) goal is to characterize the fabrication process in hopes of achieving higher yields of semiconducting (vs. metallic) CNTs.
There will definitely be a few problems with productization; molybdenum's not something you want to get anywhere near a commercial fab, and that big blob of CNT growth catalyst is a bit of a disaster. But this looks like a very nice bit of engineering.
A low-voltage 12AX7 stuffed into a digital stomp box (with a window and an LED that makes it "glow") does not give you "real vintage tube-amp sound", no matter what the "pros" at Guitar Center might tell you!
Next up, the Babbage Analytical Engine on a single chip. No need to carry those bulky logarithm tables around anymore, just a really teeny oil can...
Reading the article, it looks like what they did was build a chip that can detect the types of nanotubes growing on it - conductive or semiconductive, with the nanotube actually being grown on the chip itself.
This research is a nanotube manufacturing method, not nanotube circuit fabrication.
-R
I'm surprised that the Berkeley people grew the tubes on the semiconducting substrate (and skeptical that this is the way to go). Unless I am misreading the article (always a possibility), they have created a very expensive way to evaluate only thousands or millions of tubes per manufacturing cycle. I would think that the real key to low-cost nanotube circuits is to use bulk chemical processes.
Using bulk chemical processes, one might grow a big batch of nanotubes, harvest them, sort them by size (centrifuge), chemically modify them to have certain electronic properties (i.e., attach functional groups to the surfaces or tube ends), and sort them electrochemically (perhaps with eletrophoresis). I can envision any number of interesting bulk chemical processes that simultaneously modify, test, or sort nanotubes. These bulk processes would yield batches of trillions or quadrillions of near-uniform, high-quality semiconducting nanotubes with each cycle of the process.
And instead of using lithographic techniques (printing an accurate pattern of circuits on a wafer), I would expect nanotube circuits to be chemically deposited using self-organizing chemical films. These self-structured films can have feature dimensions far smaller than anything semiconductor maker can fabricate. The only need for lithography is at the edges -- creating an interface between the macroscopic off-chip interconnects and the nanoscopic fields of nanotube memory zones.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
...not in any computationally useful sense, anyway. Now, I'm not knocking this research, because it's a great way to make a bunch of nanotubes and examine them quickly (much faster than the usual process of making nanotubes, decorating a surface with them, hoping some of them line up with the traces you've deposited, etc.) -- but the fact remains that this is still basically an aleatoric process. You grow a bunch of nanotubes, and you know that some of them are going to be your nice metallic armchair nanotubes, some are going to be your nice semiconducting zigzags, and some are going to be junk. We don't have any way of controlling what type of nanotube we want to grow yet, nor do we have any way of getting yields high enough to make a traditional microprocessor. Right now, maybe 10 percent of the "transistors" you make out of molecules actually act like transistors. Since your Athlon is junk if even a few of its transistors or interconnects go bye-bye, and even Teramac didn't try to run with 90 percent of its transistors failed, it is clear that nanotubes for desktop-type computation are way out on the horizon.
This article has the researchers at Berkeley claiming to be the "first ever" to report success in integrating nanotubes with integrated circuits. What about that company Nantero which claims a propriety nanotube memory chip design ( NRAM ), developed by Dr. Thomas Rueckes (who got his PhD in chemistry from Harvard).They have venture capital ( from Charles River Ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Stata Venture Partners, and Harris & Harris group). Their web page (www.nantero.com) claims, " Dr. Rueckes' pioneering design takes advantage of these unique properties while cleverly integrating nanotubes with traditional semiconductor technologies for immediate manufacturability." This makes it sound like they may have a product "real soon now". Are the guys at Berkeley not aware of the work done by these "Harvard guys"? Is this an "East Coast" vs. "West Coast" rivalry? or is it just academics not being aware of what's going on commercially? or is Nantero trying to "pull a fast one" and really aren't as far along in developing "NRAM" as they imply?