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Nanowires Four Times Faster Than Silicon
evileyetmc writes "Advances in nanowires have shown that they may be the future in cheap, high-performance electronics. Researchers at Harvard have shown that nanowire transistors are are least four times faster than existing silicon ones. These nanowires show promise in being able to be embedded in plastics, and could lead to devices such as flexible displays that process information in the screen itself."
I have talked with engineers at Tokyo University about this technology, and they are very confident that nanotube transistors are the future of electronics, not only because of speed, but also because they have fewer heat dissipation problems. And the prospect of having technology for electronic displays that can be rolled up like paper for easy transport just r0x0rz!!!
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There is a great in-depth article here
... very fascinating stuff the potential for small scale electronics is just staggering.
http://uw.physics.wisc.edu/~himpsel/wires.html
i wonder how long before they can mesh nanowires directly to nerve cells... plug me in!
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The difference is SiGe (Silicon Germanium) vs. Nanowire. The 500 gHz SiGe processor is something that can be made today. In fact it was made by IBM according to the article you linked to. The reason you don't see a commercial version probably has to do with the fact that it's expensive and consumes a lot of power. I would imagine it would be more economical to buy 500 1 gHz chips at $40 a piece (current bulk price for a 1 gZh chip). The nanowire chip has potential to be more economical. If we can learn how to incorporate them into current CMOS processes, they will be very useful because wires are actually one of the biggest components in chips believe it or not. These nanowires are so small (and apparently fast now too) that they'd make chips cheaper/faster/less power intensive.
No Sigs!
Your first paragraph seems right on, but the second doesn't seem to make sense. The length of the traces have little to do with speed, it is the actual switching speed of the transistor from off to on that causes the delay. Nano wires and transistors may switch faster, but the additional 10x improvement may come from heat/density savings, not the signal path length.
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The FA is about nanowires not nanotubes. They specifically point out the large difference between the two and say that nanowires can be made reliably and require no sorting. They also state that they are easy to make at room temperature.
What I find intriguing is that the article mentions how conducive nanowire technology is to three dimensional circuit construction with a per-layer size of 100nm. That means I can build 1100 layers into a 0.11 mm thick sandwich. How about 100 Athlon 64 CPUs intermixed with 1000 1GB memory arrays? With how reliable they are claiming this technology is, that would represent a 100 core CPU, with 1 Terabyte of memory mixed in. Seems like this is clearly the future of the CPU market. Especially if the heat disappation is as good as they claim.
How do you like my new Athlon 64 X100 with 1TB of memory running at 16 GHz?
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Why has this comment scored so highly? Breast implants are made of silicone. It's a very different material.