Stanford engineers have produced a silicon chip built on carbon nanotube wires that conduct digital information at the speed of commercial computers.
"This is the first time anyone has been able to show digital signals going through nanotubes at 1 gigahertz [a billion times a second]," Stanford professor of electrical engineering H.-S. Philip Wong said in a statement "There had been a lot of expectations that nanotubes could do this, but no experimental proof so far."
I know, I know, my old, decrepit work computer is already chugging along at 3.2Ghz and I still can't stand it. So what's the big deal?
Well, for starters, they're really, really black.
The big deal is that carbon nanotubes are actually really, really small--nano small. Each nanotube is only between 50 and 100 nanometers in diameter and about 5 millionths of a meter in length. The chips have 256 ring oscillators, circuits for testing chips, and over 11,000 transistors crammed into just one hundredth of a square inch.
Not all of the nanotubes and the connections between the ring oscillators worked, but in 16 of the 19 connections, the researchers were getting a solid 800+MHz. In the best case, when the nanotubes were directly above the transistors they connected, bits were being passed at 1.02Ghz.
Its not zippy, but it opens up the potential for the best inch-for-inch performance in handheld devices. That's particularly significant, because we're running up on the creator-imposed-skeptical deadline on Moore's Law.
Moore's Law describes the half-century-old trend of the number of transistors cheaply placed on an integrated circuit doubling about every two years. Moore's Law.">That's why we now have reasonably priced, convergent wonders. Unfortunately, Gordon Moore himself observed last fall that the trend only had a good 10 or 15 years left of life. That's not nearly enough time for my iPhone/HD Recorder/Holodeck projector to be finished!
The alternative, which the Stanford researchers in partnership with Toshiba, took was to radically rethink the way chips are made. They weren't the first to work with nanotubes that way, but so far they're the fastest.
Even the proud scientists only call this a proof of concept, but is anyone else fantasizing about creating an ultra-black, gadget-heavy version of this?
Batman out.
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