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Branched Nanotubes Offer Smaller Transistors
Designadrug writes "Tiny tubes of carbon, crafted into the shape of a Y, could revolutionize the computer industry, suggests new research. The work has shown that Y-shaped carbon nanotubes are easily made and act as remarkably efficient electronic transistors - but the nanotransistors are just a few hundred millionths of a meter in size -roughly 100 times smaller than the components used in today's microprocessors."
Maybe this is how Intel will get that 9nm process they said they'd have by 2009.
Well, they still need to develop an industrial process for putting billions of those things cheaply on a small chip. That will take decades, at the very least, and in the time the current CMOS chip technology will have advanced several times... Don't hold your breath.
Except one of the reason Moore's observation held is that ICs are so much easier to make then what they replaced. These new nanotubes may not scale to well for mass production.
Moore's law IS not a fundamental law of the Universe. It was an observation of a trend that has held up for a lot long than anyone expected.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
So, uh, they are a few hundred millionths of a meter in size -- or to put it in clearer terms, a few tens of nanometers in size. That'd put them in the 30-60nm range. Intel's currently making chips on a 90nm process, and intends to start making them on a 65nm process by the end of the year.
That's not a 1/100x size improvement
Making one 5 years ago and now knowing that it has semi-conductiong properities are two entirely different things.
Dateline 21st February 1953
Scientists today revealed the molecular structure of DNA. It is theorised that this may revolutionise medical research and forensic science (and posibly Apple Pie).
And I bet someone said back then all they've done is describe the molecule.
init 11 - for when you need that edge.
Sure you can, what would you call a laser beam? Hello, photons... Anyway, QC has to date relied upon quite large molecular assemblies being banged at with NMR or similar (usually some form of heavy metal-like atoms in a carbon framework designed to allow tunable spin coupling interactions between the "data storage centers" embodied by the relatively complex orbital characteristics of the heavy atoms [s and p only scale to so many qubits using spins and the like, the larger qubit assemblies out there are starting to reach into the d and f block elements just to get enough manipulable orbital complexity]). Also... QC is not really a generably applicable method from what I've read on it so far. Sure, it allows some algorithms to run Way Fast (tm) [e.g. Schor's RSA breaker, currently at about the level of factoring "15" into "5" and "3", the smallest possible prime factorization which required a 7 qb computer; last I looked (this spring) people were publishing synthesis papers in the various chemical journals (nature, agewantde chemie, JACS, JInorg, JOrg, etc.) of up to 20-40 qb computing assemblies...], but it's not like dioctocyclo-cuprous-wtf-inol in your million dollar NMR machine or whatever is going to be efficient at inherently Von Neumann-esque things like running your bash shell. ;) In other words, much like a highly tuned vector machine (Cray, etc.), it'll be really insanely great at some tasks and sloooow at others, so it'll probably end up as a component in a larger computing assembly rather than a standalone. Of course, all this tech is at least 20 years out from market availablity (at least!), so who knows what will happen.
(I am a chemist, though my day job is web applictions dev. *shrug*)
I thought you couldn't make something out of matter smaller than an atom, eh?
I guess I'm going to have to go disappoint all those quantum computation researchers.
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
This is a very good summary.
One additional factor that needs to be added, though, is that as MOSFET transistors scale towards smaller and smaller features, leakage current becomes a larger and larger problem. Basically, at extremely small sizes, quantum effects start to become significant, and electrons randomly tunnel from one end to the other.
The larger the leakage current, the more is lost to heat.
It remains to be seen how large a problem leakage current is with the new tube transistors. If it's not a big problem, then one of the major obstacles towards reducing feature size on integrated circuits will have been addressed.
Kythe
In TFA, the "100 times smaller" comes from the length of the nanotube transistor being 1/10th that of its silicon counterpart. Cellphone-losing should increase by no more than a factor of 100 (unless 3-d chips become commonplace).
"Murphy was an optimist" - O'Toole's commentary on Murphy's Law
... I'm all over nanotech - have myself been attending Foresight Institute meetings regularly for the last decade. BUT, since the early nineties I've seen dozens of research papers promising new types of transistors and thus far the problem seems to be mass manufacturing of any of these approaches. What works in the lab is one thing - making a commercial product is another. So, don't get your hopes up to 'upgrade' to a nanochip any time soon ;-)
Nevertheless, we're heading in the right direction - this type of research caters to the VC community which is already investing heavily into privately funded nanotech related companies. Heaven knows - here in the U.S. we desperately need this type of research, may it be academically or privately driven. China, Japan, Korea, India, etc.. are catching up quickly and we already lost the race in the biotech and genetic engineering department.
"There is this volumetric processor that we call the vertebrate brain.."
:P
Which is relatively low heat density, and is impractable from a packaging standpoint. It needs way too much support harware
-nB
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