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Nanowires Four Times Faster Than Silicon

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the now-put-it-in-the-deep-freeze dept.

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."

9 of 114 comments (clear)

  1. Wrong Conversion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Why do breast implants have to be faster?

    1. Re:Wrong Conversion by Moqui · · Score: 5, Funny
      Just think of the distributed processing potential of the Los Angeles Basin! Millions upon millions of SETI cycles can be run just by the denizens of Santa Monica's 3rd Street Promonade. Drug research and nuclear explosion test data pulled from The Valley at an amazing clip.

      And people say that the owners of these devices are airheads. Nay! These are the future foremothers of the next great technological revolution -- GLDPs (Gonad Localized Distributed Processing). I for one applaud these persons of the technical cusp!

    2. Re:Wrong Conversion by szrachen · · Score: 5, Funny

      You missed the point... I think they are trying to get the fake ones to move naturally.

  2. Electronic Paper by greenpenguin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

    1. Re:Electronic Paper by SatanicPuppy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Pssh. Newspapers aren't obsolete. That's like saying "In depth news in handy, portable, written format" is obsolete.

      The media(e.g physical paper) may die, but the content will move on to the next sexy portable format that adequately fills all the niches that dumb paper (as opposed to smart paper) fills today. Despite what the average /.er maintains, the vast bulk of the population doesn't take their laptop with them into the crapper.

      Trust me on this...If newspapers could ditch the whole "Printing and Delivery" thing, they'd do it in a heartbeat. That stuff causes an amount of heartbreak you can only faintly imagine, working outside of the industry. Your data center goes down? Relocate it to your backup site an hour away...then print 100 metric tons of paper, and move it back in time to distribute it to people's lawns before 5am. It's an all-night job on a normal day. But with reliable portable e-delivery? They'd be done at midnight. They could lay off 75% of their staff, and concentrate on a better product.

      --
      ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
  3. Nano-future by UberMench · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
  4. Ah, even more restrictive than HDMI by Dr.+Manhattan · · Score: 5, Interesting
    "...flexible displays that process information in the screen itself."

    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!
  5. Isn't here more to it than 4x speed increase? by Keyslapper · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

  6. This will be expensive... by cycletronic · · Score: 5, Funny

    ... since whenever I get frustrated with buggy code I'll just crumple up the monitor and throw it away.