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Scientists Build Computer Using Carbon Nanotubes
trendspotter writes "Future computers could run on lab-grown circuits that are thousands of times thinner than a human hair and operate on a fraction of the energy required to power today's silicon-based computer chips, extending 'Moore's Law' for years to come. Stanford engineers' very basic computer device using carbon nanotube technology validates carbon nanotubes as potential successors to today's silicon semiconductors. The achievement is reported today in an article on the cover of Nature magazine written by Max Shulaker and other doctoral students in electrical engineering. The research was led by Stanford professors Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong."
Hasn't this been done before?
The most interesting thing about these alternative transistors might be environmental impact. I'm under the impression that traditional wafer fab is water intensive and heats and/or pollutes water. There are dangerous things such as arsenic and bromine involved. If the carbon nano-tube process is clean that'd be awesome. It would be great to think that we could dispose of obsolete technology by incinerating it, and not release anything other than CO2 into the air, leaving behind slag that's full of recyclable silver and copper.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I am just glad that we can still use Mores law to accommodate sloppy and bloated programming for a while longer. The thought that programming might have to become efficient filled me with dread!
I can't remember the book I read this in, but it posited that if you remove the silicon part of Moore's Law and you just talk about computing power and cost and the like that you can make a case that it has been in place throughout human history. In other words computing power has always been doubling, it just started by drawing numbers in the dirt, went to the abacus, etc.. etc... until we reached the silicon age and integrated circuits.
The hand wringing that the idea behind Moore's Law will ever end is just silly. When we reach the limits of silicon chips some other technology will take its place. This is just how human technology works.
1. "Lab-grown circuits that are thousands of times thinner than a human hair" is exactly what one could use to describe current silicon circuits. In fact, this study made transistors that are a micron across (which is, at best, hundreds of times thinner than a human hair), compared to current state-of-the-art silicon which is in the 22-28 nm range.
2. "A fraction of the energy required" does not describe the current study, nor was it their intent, from what I understand about the researchers' claims.
That's not to say that the research isn't very valuable; it looks like the level of integration they've managed is significantly better than what anybody else has achieved. But at the same time, there are lots of other ways that you could build a circuit that uses more area, costs more, takes longer to build, and is less power-efficient - this is just one more. All they've demonstrated is that you can hook together more than a handful of transistors successfully - but nowhere near the billions that they'd need for a commercial product.
The real breakthroughs have yet to be made; making it cheaper, smaller, faster, more efficient, and easily manufacturable - all at the same time. Not until all those problems are solved will it even have a chance of replacing real silicon. Until then, this is yet another case of a university PR rep boasting about their institution's research with grand claims about what the future holds, while not really reflecting the true nature of the research at hand.
(Admittedly, it is more boring when you adhere to reality.)
This is what will drive the future legislation to eliminate all hair in order to protect Hollywood and save us from perverts and terrists.
Cloudiot: A person who does not see offsite storage as a way to lose control over access to his or her own data.
The number of people predicting the end of Moore's Law doubles every two years.