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IBM Creates Ring Oscillator on a Single Nanotube
deeptrace writes "IBM has combined CMOS circuitry and a single carbon nanotube to implement a 5 stage ring oscillator. Even though the oscillator runs at just 52 MHz, they expect that it could reach the GHz range with improvements. The frequency of the current oscillator was higher than previous circuits using multiple nanotubes. IBM describes the achievement in the paper "Integrated Logic Circuit Assembled on a Single Carbon Nanotube" to be published this week in the journal Science."
You know what could use some imprevements? (I think you do.)
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Some of us are not nano-physicists/EEs, so it's not clear as to what the big deal is.
I was misled to believe that the entire circuit was literally on the surface of the nanotub but from the picture in the article it looks like the nanotube is touching a couple of pads.
Anyway, what is the significance of the low frequency? Is the ring oscillator circuit supposed to be limited in frequency only by process parasitics, so that researchers can determine the maximum frequency the process can sustain?
Now let's talk about REAL innovation. Microsoft just announced a new facial feature pack for Office's "Clippy." Now you can customize Clippy according to your facial preferences. Options include complexion, hair style, nose shape and size, and ear/nose jewelry.
The oscillator works better using a single nanotube fiber than when using multiple nanotubes, according to the article. Since nanotubes carry current along the outer surface of the tube, could it be that multiple nanotubes cause the electrical quanta along the surface of each tube to interfere and degrade the signal? The article does not explain why they saw reduced performance with multiple tubes than with a single tube.
It is important to keep in mind that 52MHz is the maximum performance achievable in this setup with this material. Silicon's performance is much higher. However through changes to the nanotube material, the performance of the nanotube may be impreved. How they will achieve higher performance over a single nanotube will be interesting because it can't be reduced any further, and multiple tubes results in lower performance. Perhaps some sort of lattice structure will be able to allow greater imprevements.
IBM is motivated by pure profit, and they did this for just that reason. And for the reason of pure profit, IBM has advanced the course of science. That's the idea of capitalism; people work harder when their purpose is more tangible than the good of mankind's collective knowledge.
Of course, there is the danger of this becoming "capitalism at its worst," i.e., patented...
Until they develop an imprevement we shouldn't expect the GHz range. A quick google doesn't provide any further information other then suggesting it is a spelling mistake.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
What exactly this means?
hilarious
Right in the middle of the 6-meter Amateur Radio band! Sounds like a nice local oscillator for an ultra-tiny nano "rig". Now, to figure out how to directly modulate it for direct FM or FSK.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Microsoft announced today that they have achieved a full annoyance oscillator and generator on a single virtual piece of bent metal.
The findings titled "How to make Clippy more annoying" will be published next week in the Mr. Ballmer's Journal of IBM Bashing
Could someone please explain what are the practical uses for the ring oscillator?
"Integrated Logic Circuit Assembled on a Single Carbon Nanotube"
Does anyone else notice that you could create the acronym "ILicASCaN" with that? I lick ass can? Whoa!
See, those core duo processors are cool, but when they're able to fit 1024 cores onto a chip, and then you have 8-chip machines, and each core is a 24 GHZ nanotech quantum computer, we'll start to see some real performance. Either that, or Microsoft will make Windows even more bloated.
In between positive and negative there is zero.
Congratulations - you just qualified as a Slashdot editor !
a ring Oscillator!
On a Single Nanotube!
crap all mighty!!!
They're just showing off.
It's nothing but a token ring.
=brian
...at the IBM labs Oh yeah! Nanotech really turns the hot chicks on
So I'm guessing that they have a Amateur Radio License. I wonder if they can get the nanotube to do single sideband on 6 meters.
-- I have a private email server in my basement.
That's the same circuit mentioned in the recent transparent IC story where TFA said
Now we can build a 486DX2 with oscillator in just a square millimeter. Just imagine having a complete computer with semi-transparent screen built into your glasses.
or use it as world's tiniest CW emitter.
for a bulk package that will hold a few million of 'em!
Does anyone else get the impression that most people have no idea the potential for nanotech? Or maybe those that do are just schizo and nerdy.
OK here's the explanation in 1337:
Carbon nanotubes = t3h w00t
CMOS = reality
Ring oscillator = first tests to integrate t3h w00t into reality
It means that before this, nanotubes and nanotube transistors were only tested in the lab, using microscopic clamps, cables, probes, etc. But this is the first time that a carbon nanotube can be integrated into a working CMOS chip (a small step for chips, a giant leap for mankind). Once CMOS manufacturing can be adjusted for carbon nanotubes, we'll be able to manufacture nanotube memory, nanotube chipsets, and finally, nanotube CPU's!
This is what i've been waiting for since i ever heard about nanotube transistors (however, i think that using graphene sheets instead of nanotubes will be much more effective).
"Hey Ethel, it looks like tube circuits are making a comeback!"
Lets see if this helps. Some people were confused...
A ring oscillator is a device for making square waves. It uses a common component, a NOT gate. In digital logic, there are two levels, high and low (or 1 and 0, respectivly). High is usually, as far as I have seen, +5 volts, while low is 0 volts (ground).
A NOT gate simply inverts the input. If the value is 1, it outputs 0. If the value is 0, it outputs 1. If the value is somewhere between the two, it will choose one state or the other based on some threshold voltage.
Changing output is not instantaneous. How much time it takes, I don't know. However, it is very fast.
I was going to draw a schematic, but I gave up on appeasing the lameness filter. So, we will use the power of imagination! Imagine one of these NOT gates hooked up to itself. It will switch on and off at a terrific rate. Put a wire on the output, and you have a square wave! Want it slower? Take another two NOT gates, and put them in the loop, so that the first one goes to the second goes to the third. Slower? Another two. If the number of NOT gates was even, the inverted signal would be uninverted by the next NOT gate, which is not what we want.
For more control, one can use a capacitor in a certain arrangment (I'm not looking through my notes). It will take a while to charge and discharge, acting as a delay. Just don't read its voltage as the signal, or you will get a dropping bit, then a rising bit, rather than a nice clean square wave.
Quite useful devices. I hope this clarifies things.
I have freaks! I did something right...
If you're considerring using carbon nanotubes as a sex toy...you've got a problem. A very, very small problem, in fact.
GENERATION 26: The first time you see this, copy it into your sig on any forum and add 1 to the generation.
Some people seem to be wondering if this is just showing off, or are there short to medium term applications for this? I think that one of the first, fairly simple applications for this is in the field of gate arrays. FPGA's, or field-programmable gate arrays, are cool devices that emulate strings of logic gates. They can be used in circuit design tasks, emulating loads on networks, and any number of geeky things. FPGA's are often considered the ugly step sister to application-specific integrated circuits, or ASIC's. Why? Because they suck more power and they're slower. People still use FPGA's a lot of the time because they're more flexible, you can change them on the fly. Now imagine an FPGA that's ultra-miniaturized, drawing almost no power, producing very little heat, and operating at amazing speeds. They need to perfect NAND or NOR gates, but once they have one of those, they can replicate them a billion times, and either of those gate types will be able to emulate every other logic gate, when placed in the right order. That's one interesting application, on the pure logic level. So it might be an exciting time, depending on how quickly they can move this out of the lab. I love this stuff.
Bill Ricardi - Jigsale LLP
Egg-raid on Nijola!
Egg-raid on Nijola!
Fucked right up!
Fucked right up!
Come on bitch, try to stand up,
put down the remote,
are you "down with The Goats"?
Pull down your pants,
I wanna see you dance!
Come on over here, slip that cute, l'il ring on my nanotube and lets oscillate Baby!
Travelling forward in time at a rate of 1 second per second.
And this is a bad thing HOW?
Maybe I missed something, but this doesn't really look like flamebait, and I think that's a fairly harsh mod for what appears to be a simple (if badly worded) question.
When cryptography is outlawed, bayl bhgynjf jvyy unir cevinpl
against ring osculation. It's disgusting and vulgar. What's wrong with just holding hands, or kissing on the lips? Miss O'Tube should be ashamed of herself. With a reputation like that, she's going to stay single. Back to you, Cheddar.
That made things a lot clearer.
Who'd of thought your knowledge would pay off so soon?
From the article: "Circuit designers understand that n-type transistors can be turned on with positive voltage applied to the drain; p-types are exactly the opposite."
Surely they mean 'applied to the gate' (the input voltage is gate to source, the output voltage is drain to source)
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If I hadn't posted already I'd mod you up.
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The AC owns IBM shares.
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Does anyone know what the maximum plate voltage is for a Nano tube?
Also looking for a socket supplier, can't find any on E-Bay.
Thanks,
Rick
Microsoft's Vista team has invented a new Daisy-Chain Vacillator.
September 2011: Looking for Cocoa/iOS work in Boston area Cocoa Programmer Quincy, MA
As the article states, they designed a test bed to test nanotubes. You know, benchmarks? They've designed a known circuit, where the chief variable is the performance of the nanotube. They then can try to improve the nanotube and test its performance again.
People are missing the forest for the (exceedingly small) trees.
A ring oscillator is a device composed of an odd number of NOT gates whose output oscillates between two voltage levels So, if it's NOT gates, what is it then?
Defining Statistics and Social Research
So ... this is basically BogoMIPS for CPU design processes? :)
I was going to make a smartass remark about being able to use "new and improved" trinary computers, with positive, negative, and neutral voltages on these transistors, but then I found out they already exist!
D'oh!
Well, at least I can welcome our ternary computing overlords!
Want to make a very simple ring oscillator? Get three cheap nightlights -- the ones that turn on when it's dark -- and plug them all in on extension cords close to one another, so that each one's light is near another one's light detection cell. Congratulations: you've just made a three-unit ring oscillator. They operate at about 0.5Hz. It's also easy to make five and seven unit oscillators, of course.
For extra credit, making NOR gates using nightlights is fairly easy but making NAND gates takes quite a bit of fussing around. Flipflops are dead easy. If you can do all those you can build a half-adder circuit with carry bit, and you're well on your way to a very, very slow, large, hot optical computer.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
that using a NOT gate it is possible to build any logic gate, and hence a computer.
It's OK Bender, there's no such thing as 2.
Someone wasted a mod point. Cretin.
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Looking at the picture in the article I have trouble finding anything newsworthy. The nanotube does not appear to be a functional element in the circuit. I see six cascaded cmos inverters. The fifth inverter provides feedback to the first to form the ring oscillator. The sixth inverter is also driven by the fifth inverter effectively using the sixth inverter as a buffer. One end of the nanotube appears to overlap the output of the sixth inverter, implying that the sixth inverter and the nanotube make contact. There is no indication that the far end of the nanotube is in contact with anything. Perhaps this is a nanotube antenna. At 52 MHz the nanotube is an incredibly short antenna and probably much less effective at radiating at 52 MHz than the power supply leads. I don't see how the nanotube has any effect on the circuit operation or is relevant to the operating frequency.
I did see one claim in that may have some merit. I think this is the first time I have seen a picture of a nanotube on an active silicon circuit. I have heard of nanotubes on silicon before. As far as I can recall those only used the silicon as a passive substrate for metal connections.
This sounds like a case of "Hey! You got a nanotube on my chip!" "Hey!, You got a chip on my nanotube!" But this is still a long way from a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup.
though carbon nanotube(CNT) seems a promising tech that could be widely used on electronic devices, but it has a long way to be utilized in your chips as i foresee. Even neglecting the other challenges they may face to put CNT into industry, the process to assemble the nanotube into a specific place on the chip is a difficult task - simply scientists use lab equipment to locate CNT and other tiny structures. Yet how they did this when trillions of CNT are going to placed? I believe a mature tech should be existed with mature mass-production. I donot think current ways like photo-subtractive method would work. IBM's work is nothing more than a news headline