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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."
Why do breast implants have to be faster?
The article says that we won't see this technology in computers and PDAs for a while because the relatively high cost of implementing mass production of nanowires cannot be justified by a mere 4x increase in speed. Its application will be limited to scientific research for now.
Still, there is hope for implanted computers.
Homestarrunner.net -- It's Dot Com!
No, it actually processes information BEHIND the screen (and I wouldn't actually call that flexible despite the desire to twist it in all kinds of crazy configurations by beating it up against your head).
Integrated with things like electronic paper, this would be brilliant - it would eliminate the need for a bulky separate processing unit. Imagine being able to hold a piece of paper that acts as a (very) basic computer...
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!!!
If video games are created by teams of designers and artists, how are they not art??? www.skylarscaling.com
"Complicated lithography" is why we can stuff so many (millions) transistors on a chip. LSI would be impossible without it or a similar process. The idea of something that you have to sort and handle on an individual basis makes these transistors a non-starter for most applications. On the other hand, something like this could be used for microwave amplifiers. They could also be used the same way we now use ECL; as front-end flip-flops which convert signals to lower clock rates that can be dealt with by conventional circuitry.
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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This is MY galaxy...go find your OWN!
you don't. yes i know that bridging clock domains is a major
source of instability and engineering headache, but independently
clocked functional units and fine-grained async designs already
exist, don't they?
Now the signal doesn't just get decrypted in the monitor, it doesn't even get decrypted and displayed until it reaches the display surface itself. Still doesn't close the analog hole, though...
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
I do see a lot of potential for this technology for embedded systems use--particulary 'smart maps'--if we can embed display control electronics physically closer to the displays (lighter, thinner, etc). Once costs are researched down, some really neat shit is in the offing (OLED + nanowidth signal processors, anyone?).
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
What?!
Regardless of what Apple's marketing team tries to imply that camera is clearly build into the shell with the lens peaking through an opening above the monitor.
I know Apple likes to make their technology sound like it's more advanced than it really is, but rest assured that the display itself doesn't have a camera built in.
I'm not an EE, so I might be wrong about some of this, but this is how I understand things - please corroborate or correct as appropriate.
If the "hardware" is actually 4x faster than silicon, then that's a 4x increase for similarly scaled systems, right? The thing is that this technology can generate huge improvements in one of the primary focal points in chip design (aside from materials) over the last couple decades: smaller scale. There are several advantages to this: speed, heat, and power consumption, to name the top 3.
If you only have to send a signal 1/10th the distance to get it processed, that's a 10x increase in the throughput. If the processing also takes place in an area 1/10th the size, that's a full 10x increase in speed for the same construction material. (I pulled that 1/10th out of the air for ease of use, I realize nanowires could potentially construct circuits much smaller than this scale compared to current silicon architecture.)
Now, make that material 4x faster on top of the scaling improvements, and you have, not a 4x improvement, but a 40x improvement, right? Is there some glaring technical detail I'm missing?
... since whenever I get frustrated with buggy code I'll just crumple up the monitor and throw it away.
I have a freind who does nanotube research.
The problem, as I understand, is sorting.
Not all nanotubes are conductive, and they can't be manufactured selectiveley.
But otherwise they behave similarly.
It's like me giving you a pile of billions of wires and saying: "Here, some of these conduct, and others don't. Now start sorting."
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The IBM chip is silicon at extremely low temperatures (~4.5K). This story is about carbon nanotubes being used in transistors. Two completely seperate and unrelated technologies.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
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!
A nanowire is a wire of dimensions of the order of a nanometer (109 meters). They can be made out of Carbon Nanotube, but can also be made of other substances (e.g. Nickel, or Silicon)
No Sigs!
4x faster? At least it will be out just in time for Vista.
People are throwing money at nano-this and nano-that because it has great PR, but nothing as yet has come remotely close to being a credible alternative to silicon CMOS for ULSI devices. Consider where silicon CMOS is at the moment - we can put a billion transistors all together on the same logic chip for tens of dollars. A bit of DRAM costs less than a billionth of a dollar. This is what we can do now - think how much further it will have gone in 15 years, when the new nano-stuff is supposed to be competing. Any new technology will have to be considerably better than what is already available for anyone to invest in it, and looking at the current state of things it's just not going to happen. They are banking on miracle breakthroughs. There is also a credibility issue with manufacture and interconnect. It's one thing to make one super-fast nanotube transistor and say "ooh, look how good it is!" But it's quite another to be able to put a trillion of them on the same chip, all wired together, for cheaper than CMOS. That is what they are going to have to do to compete with where silicon will be in 15-20 years. To be fair, the guy in the article seems well aware of this.
They're shorter. If you are talking about speeds measured at this kind of scale, the length of travel is a significant part of that speed gain. If you make the little electrons run further, they take longer to get here. The little bastards fairly sprint through the nanowires though.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Unless you require a single chip running at 500 GHz for some specific signal processing application - in which case the complexity of the chip would not be that tremendous and the manufacturing costs therefore much lower. Not all ICs are meant to be general-purpose computers, after all. (Not to mention that actual processing power doesn't grow in a linear fashion as you add cores, but that's beside the point.)
You're probably right in that nanowires will have applicability in a broader range, and the embedded market will most certainly be thrilled to get their hands at them.
Nanotechnology is unlikely to make any significant impact in the next 10 years. We may make significant advances in the research lab, but that doesn't mean there will be any products. I'm thinking it may be slightly better than nuclear fusion...
See, this is where your old computer comes in. You just put it on the papers you don't want to blow away--and they don't!
On a more serious note, the reason for having flexibility is mostly for ease of use. You can't fold up many displays now--how would you like to put one in your back pocket, forget about it, then sit down--crunch!
With flexibility also comes easier storage. Have you ever tried storing something large and bulky? It's a pain, right? Say an old dresser. What would you give to be able to fold it up, put it under one arm, and stick it in the basement? It'd be much easier and take up mauch less space.