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Intel Experimenting With Nanotubes
illeism writes "C|Net is reporting on Intel's experimentation with nanotubes in processors. From the article: 'The chip giant has managed to create prototype interconnects — microscopic metallic wires inside of chips that link transistors ... Carbon nanotubes ... conduct electricity far better than metals. In fact, nanotubes exhibit what's called ballistic conductivity, which means that electrons are not scattered or impeded by obstacles.'"
Tubes are ascendant!
Truly, Ted is a technology genius. It's only a matter of time before these "nano tubes" are implemented to speed delivery of Internet content.
You mean like really really small Internets?
Hey this is all really interesting stuff ...I think getting Intel behind some of the manufacturing technicalities is a major boon to the industry. Nanotubes, if intel's research confirms this, should prove to be useful in many different applications from mass power distribution to an elevator to the heavens.. who knows .. stay tunes.. also as an interesting side note.. VLSI will hit a rock bottom soon... I did a presentation in my Nanotechnology class last Spring on Quantum Dot Cellular Automata . This uses the electromagnetic repulsion of electons to propegate signals across molecules that are arranged in such a way to form logic gates..
http://www.nd.edu/~qcahome/
-Ian
ian at ianroessle.org
This sounds like it could be of particular use in 3D microprocessor technology. With the number of cores per die ramping up at incredible rates, we're starting to bump into latency issues again. I know that several memory manufacturers (who experinece similar die-space problems) have already switched to layered components to help relieve the issue and keep their dies smaller. But if we can weave nanotubes, we could do a lot more than just stack transistors three or four levels deep. Assuming that a inexpensive manufacturing process were developed, the chip could actually be fashioned in the shape of a cube. The result would make the chip orders of magnitude more dense than the CPUs of today!
:P
Besides, it would look like a Borg cube under a microscope. How cool is that?!?
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No Nanotrucks?
Too many zeros, not enough ones
If you get something running topped-out it may produce some waste heat. Thin chips with only a few layers can rely on a large, flat piece of some kind of substrate attached to a big heat sink and fan. If you make a cube-shaped processor, the innermost parts' heat will have to be dissipated through many other layers of working parts, creating a temperature gradient within the processor. If the innermost parts must be kept below a certain temperature, the outermost must be kept well below that temperature to allow for thermal conduction and the whole thing will have to run very cool relative to today's chips.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
People will conduct electricity (otherwise the electric chair wouldn't work), does that mean that people are made out of metal?
Does Ted Stevens provide plumbing service for Intel nanoproducts? He's the tube expert! He must know all about these exotic nanotube thingies...
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
I fail to see what the fuss is about. A quick search of Web of Knowledge (for those of you with access to online periodicals) gives several abstracts where connections were formed with carbon nanotubes and the electronic properties were studied. To throw around buzzwords, how do you think researchers already knew about this "ballistic conductivity" before Intel made these interconnects? Unless the Intel results indicate how to fabricate these interconnects in bulk, there's absolutely nothing worth talking about. The real bottleneck, as the article describes, is finding a way to sort the little guys. There isn't a standard technique (yet) to efficiently separate large quantities of the semiconducting and metallic tubes, or to separate the tubes by size. If either or both of of these advancements are made, those findings will be worth all the hype! Making an electrical connection with a single walled carbon nanotube is nothing new, and shouldn't be given any special note.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Yes!
While metals tend to be excellent electrical conductors, pretty much anything can conduct given enough voltage. Even air conducts, as evidenced via lightning.
I'll get mod'd down for this, but I don't care, it has to be said.
Is it just me or are these tubes jokes just getting old and stale? They were funny for the first few months, but now they're just predictable.
Stop mod'ing them as funny, they aren't anymore. There's very little humor value in a 3 month old joke, that gets told -invariably- everyday, on at least one story. Ted Stevens is a tool. His explanation was stupid, but it wasn't that funny...at least not this long after he'd made it.
Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick Two.
A processor is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of (nano)tubes! And if you don't understand that these tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your program in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by any process that puts into that tube enormous amounts of instructions, enormous amounts of instructions.
I am the maverick of Slashdot
Are you serious, or are you just trolling? As a blatant counterexample, there are non-metallic superconductors, which conduct electricity infinitely better than a metal. So sure, metals conduct (with non-zero resistance) and have some common characteristics, eg their fermi energy typically lies in the middle of a band (unlike semiconductors or insulators), ratio of thermal to electrical conductivity is relatively constant, etc.
But there are many things that also conduct fairly well at room temperature, such as doped silicon (an insulator). However, cool down silicon and the resistance increases (not enough thermal energy to excite electrons above the bandgap). Cool down a metal and its resistance will decrease (to a limiting factor). Cool down a superconductor and it undergoes a phase transition to a state of infinite conductivity.
Carbon nanotubes are actually extremely interesting in this regards, they can look metallic or insulating, depending on the chirality (ie, how the graphene plane is rolled into a tube). The metallic ones (with the fermi energy in the middle of a band) have quite long mean-free paths. Hence electrons can travel through the tube without scattering (this is the ballistic travel mentioned in the slashdot blurb). This limits the nanotubes resistance to the quantum resistance of about 25 kOhm. (Actually, the tube's resistance is 1/4 this resistance, as there are four quantum conducting channels because the graphene plane has two independent sites in its unit cell, and each site can have two values of electron spin).
Even some the insulating (or semiconducting) carbon nanotubes (or the graphene plane itself) are really cool. Due to the layout of the graphene plane, the band structure isn't pseudo-parabolic (as in a standard insulator) but conical (two cones meeting at a point), like a Minkowski light cone, or MCP from TRON. In the right orientations, the Fermi energy lies exactly at the intersection, and believe it or not, the excited states look EXACTLY like relativistic massive particles. The speed of light is mapped to the speed of sound instead, in this system. Really cool stuff, there are tons of future applications for nanotubes and graphene studies due to the interesting band structure, we've only really begun to break the surface.
make world, not war
something smells bad, very bad. Oh, yes, it is YOU. Bad hygiene. Moronocity. Get lost dude. he's american
Ugh. I meant the usual meaning of "conducts electricity", not some sick definition where everything including insulators "conduct electricity" because they do if you subject them to 1 gazillon volts. If you need a technical definition to understand then read the Metal article on Wikipedia.
What a stupid comment. If a carbon nanotube conducts electricity then it is by definition a metal.
|People will conduct electricity (otherwise the electric chair wouldn't work), does that mean that people are made out of metal?
And if they float, they are witches! BUUURN..... er ahem.... carry on.
THE WORLD IS GOING TO END!!!! eventually.
But there are many things that also conduct fairly well at room temperature, such as doped silicon (an insulator).
Or how about a person?
Stop backpedaling. You know you were wrong, and that's all that counts.
I'm not sure what is used in processors currently, but having the links as nanotubes would help the heat transfer within the material also. Nanotubes have a thermal conductivity of around 2000-3000 W/m/K at normal CPU operating temperatures. This is a huge increase when you compare it to the 149 W/m/K for silicon and 318 W/m/K for gold at room temperature.
So the increase in thermal conductivity by just having a proportion of the CPU made from nanotubes could possibly be enough to make up for the shape change. I wouldn't have thought much power would be saved by using nanotubes over any other conductor though. I'd be guessing most of the power loss is in the silicon gates, but I might be wrong.
http://www.pa.msu.edu/cmp/csc/ntproperties/thermal transport.html Carbon Nanotube Thermal Conductivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silicon Silicon Thermal Conductivity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold Gold Thermal Conductivity
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The smallest Sierpinski Cube has 20 blocks and 7 empty spaces, so I guess a Sierpinski cpu would be 25% larger than necessary, but easy to cool.
Doped carbon.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Hilarity. I was waiting for you to mention good 'ol H2O.
Wrong! There are plastics that can conduct electricity, water conducts electricity, and in some rare instances certain mixures of concrete can conduct electricity.
Michael "TheZorch" Haney
thezorch@gmail.com
http://thezorch.googlepages.com/home
I'm not sure who's trolling here. Your post says that you accept that the nanotubes of the article are metals, so your beef is only about the definition of "metallic", but you fail to provide one.
Hmmm. Now, I'm not so good at the Chemistry, but I seem to remember water being a non-conductive material. It needed electrolytes or something like that to conduct electricity, didn't it?
Gamertag: WyleType
Just a bit of a nitpick: resistance is the measure of how much a certain object/length of wire resists current. For a type of material of unknown physical characteristics resistivity (Ohms*meters) is the proper unit. Otherwise, very informative and interesting post.
None of the dates I've got of /. were really 'girlfriend' material.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
Resistivity is the inverse of conductivity..
Conductivity is a function of:
A) Number of possible free electron states (positions) - function of temperature
B) Mean time to collision for given electron - function of temperature
C) [free] Electron density - function of temperature
Note that higher temperatures mean:
B) greater vibrational or translational properties of the material which obstruct the paths of free electrons.. So B is inversely proportional to temperature.
C) greater number of electrons are excited and thus broken from their atomic bonds (or at least lower atomic orbitals) and thus a greater number of electrons are available to participate in conduction. So C is directly proportional to temperature
Any material that
A) has free electrons (non-atomicly bound OR in covalent orbitals / orbitals shared between atoms)
B) has a non-infinite potential barrier between geometric positions
C) is above absolute zero
Naturally, the wider the path (radially), the greater the number of electrons and the greater the number of electron states, so the greater the conductivity.. It's 1 to 1 or linear growth.
As for length, the conductivity is an intrinsic measure, so length is somewhat irrelevant. However as a matter of practicality, on a large scale, the longer a path a given set of electrons have to travel, the more collisions will occur and thus the greater number of energy dispersals will occur and thus a greater amount of waste-heat. So you get an effectively greater measurement of resistance the longer the wire. This too is linear..
But length is usually a function of practical design (gotta connect two geographically distinct items).. Width, on the other hand is often a function of technology (how small can I make it) AND because width directly affects conductivity (gotta be wider to conduct more electrons), the intrinsic conductivity of the material dictates that for a given requirement of current and voltage, you must have a certain width for a given material.
However, not all geometries are created equally. The shape of the material, (which includes the curvature.. gentle curves v.s. right angles) affects the electro-static properties of the material. Indeed the mean-free-path to collision is different around the edges/boundries of a material, so obviously curved wire will have different properties than straight wire. Likewise the type of material adjacent to the conductor dramatically affects it's properties.
So to your original statement about water.
A) Water is a naturally polarized particle, so it can easily support attraction of free electrons.
Ionized water (e.g. salt-water) has even greater electron attraction
B) Water is anamorphic (non structured, and constantly moving), so the mean-time-to-collision is pretty short.. This restricts conductivity significantly.
C) Water is not naturally ionized - it doesn't give off a free electron in it's natural state at room-temperature, so there are very few actual electrons available to conduct. Salt, on the other hand DOES give off a free electron when ionized in water. Likewise acids are ionized giving off free electrons. Thus lead-acid batteries use water with lots of free electrons, and thus conduct electricity reasonably well. Note that it's the storage of electrons, not the conductivity of electrons that makes these batteries useful. In fact the collisions due to high current conduction heats up the water.. This is how car batteries can explode, and this is why you should never open up the battery ports immediately after a car has been running for a long time.
-Michael
Don't forget the blinking lights.
Light still is faster than electrons.
Call me when I get Orac for my Desktop.
The Singularity is closer than you think
Quant
Can we go back to spaghetti code? The Noodly One will be pleased!
One line blog. I hear that they're called Twitters now.
Is that a nanotube in your pocket, or are you just not happy to see me?
plastics conduct by big PI bond, water conducts by ions moving in water, ceramics conduct by motion of charged defects and ions.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
well... what do you mean by "carbon nanotubes"?...
/g for the C60, 250 /g for C70 and more than 2000 /g for the C84. it is just too expensive for now.
it shurely is a great tecnology, which will be very important in the future, but for now, it has no practical use, because they're too expensive. at least the one i'm going to talk about.
the best nanotube is made of fullerene, but it actually costs too much to be used...
the cool part of the fullerene is that it is stronger than the diamond, and if you accellerate a single C84 till 350km/s (tha max we can) against an other C84, they will just bounce!
actually the costs depends on the fullerene type, C60, C70 or C84.
in 2004 and before, were produced a total of more than 5000 kg of C60, little more than 220 kg of C70 and only 10 kg of C84... the costs?
20-20
I remember single wall nanotubes are either metallic or semiconductive. It is pretty interesting to know how could they only grow metallic nanotubes or remove semiconductive nanotubes. Or actually they don't, and the electrons select metallic tubes automatically, but I highly doubt this approach because the electrons via metallic nannotubes and electrons via semiconductive nanotubes will arrive at different time. I am waiting for my friend who attend the meeting tell me the whole story.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Now if we can only mass produce a 21st century way to generate the steam.
Random people writing science articles is almost as annoying as politicians deciding whether global warming is real, stem cell research is kosher, or evolution is impossible because the numbers are too big. -I agree, leave it to the professionals.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
Wrong, not in the quantum ballistic limit, where each quantum conducting channel contributes one unit of quantum conductance, (2e^2/h), where conductance is inverse of resistance. It makes no sense to talk about resistance per unit length when the electron travels ballistically through the device!
make world, not war
Ok, here's today's chemistry lesson:
Dig out your periodic table and take a look. Carbon, (C,6) is in the upper-right section of the table, to the right of the zig-zag line that determines whether a given element is a metal, non-metal, or transitional element. Carbon conducts electricity under certain circumstances, as do silicon (Si, 14), phosphorus (P, 15), germanium (Ge, 32), and arsenic (As, 33); none of which are metals (silicon, germanium, and arsenic are a transitional elements that exhibit properties of both metals and non-metals, and while some groups of thought place them as a metals, most refer to them as a transitional elements, which are neither metals, nor non-metals). Even some of the noble gases such as Neon (Ne, 10) and Argon (Ar, 18) can be made to conduct electricity under certain circumstances, which is how a neon light works. By definition a metal is any element, even Hydrogen (H,1) when in the solid phase, that exists left of the line (I can't remember the name of the line offhand). A metal exhibits certain properties: It is malleable (can be hammered into shape without breaking), ductile (can be pulled into wires), it conducts electricity, and exhibits metallic bonding when in the presence of other metal atoms (The nuclei remain relatively stationary, while a tide of electrons flows freely from one atom to the next, which is responsible for a metal's conductivity).
Therefore, while all metals conduct electricity, not everything that conducts electricity is a metal; in the same way that all beagles are dogs, but not all dogs are beagles.
Salt water conducts electricity, even with low current and voltage. This is due to the ionization of the chlorine and sodium atoms, and not the fact that sodium is a metal. When dissolved in water, the ions separate and, in fact, the negatively charged NON-METALLIC chlorine atoms are responsible for the conductivity.
It's been a few years since chemistry class, so if I got something wrong or omitted something, please correct me.
What a stupid comment. If a carbon nanotube conducts electricity then it is by definition a metal.
Are you serious, or are you just trolling?
What's sad is he just might be serious, I had a teacher in high school(Utah) who tried to tell me gravity is the result of a giant magnet at the center of the earth, and the only reason everything stays down is because everything has metal in it.
If that doesn't make you cry I don't know what will.
We actually did the experiment in class, with water, electrodes, a battery, a small light bulb and salt.
Yeah. Would you choose a neurosurgeon who pokes around people's brains in his spare time? I wouldn't.
Only redundant if you have all day to read slashdot. If you have 15 minutes in the morning to read anything interesting on slashdot, you, much like myself, probably didn't see another tubes comment. Someone should take your modpoints.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Not to mention that because they float they weigh no more than a duck and ducks float because they're made of wood. So in conclusion Humans are made of wood not metal.
All elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are metal!
At the Wired Nextfest show back in September, IBM showcased some of their nano tech and carbon nano tubes were also on display. They're also looking into ways of producing these things in mass quantities and I think that they're a little ahead of intel in the research aspect right now. IBM can actually create tubes in different shapes and that's a step up on the competition.
If man must go to the moon then yes, he will go there....
Hmm, interesting. Learn something new everyday.
In that link, when they get to the point J=sigma E, that is Ohm's Law, albeit in a form you might not be familiar with, where J is the current density, E is electric field, and sigma is conductivity, or the inverse of resistivity. Assuming no gradients in current or field, you can use J=I/A and E=V/d where A is cross-sectional area, d is length of the chunk, and you can derive Ohm's law in the form you're more familiar with, with the resistance as a function of resistivity (the one you alluded to previously).
make world, not war