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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 ?
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.
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.
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).
This message is encrypted with Quad ROT-13 to protect the author's copyright under the DMCA.
How many bit CPUs will we need to address 1,280,000MB of RAM?
41.
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.
"Ok, if you have 10,000 more the space, it all disappears when you power off right?"
Actually, no. The basic technology from the last story (can't find it now - slashdot's search seems disabled now) implied that the memory would not require constant charge, but would instead be based on van-der-waals effect on many nanotubes to make up one bit. It's not the most efficient method - it's just much more data-dense than current methods.
Ryan Fenton
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."
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...
...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.