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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.
because linux runs fairly shit at the moment... it's a poor man's toy.
Well, if some sort of a speedup is an eight-year-old boy and a carbon nanotube is my penis, then yes.
Slashdot: news for Apple. Stuff that Apple.
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.
Oh crap. Looks like I forgot to post anonymously. Well, I know how to fix that.
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
Blame Haggard.
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
something smells bad, very bad. Oh, yes, it is YOU. Bad hygiene. Moronocity. Get lost dude. he's american
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.
Your penis is 50,000 times smaller than a human hair?
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
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.
Wouldn't smaller tubes make your internets go slower? Hope the mods see my isajoke flag waving.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Is that a nanotube in your pocket, or are you just not happy to see me?
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.
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....