Nanotech Breakthrough May Extend Moore's Law

Researchers at IBM have made a breakthrough that they think may extend Moore's Law. Researchers at IBM have overcome one of the biggest challenges facing the microchip industry when it comes to bringing carbon nanotube transistors into the main stream. Researchers have been able to demonstrate the first carbon nanotube transistors that don't see reduced performance when they are miniaturized.

IBM hopes to use the breakthrough to develop high-performance computing systems for data analytics and cognitive computing. To keep Moore's Law going, researchers and scientist have been working with new materials and processes to allow the cramming of more transistors onto microchips.

Carbon nanotubes are one of the most promising replacements for silicon in transistors today because the tiny little devices use less power to switch the state of transistors. IBMs breakthrough is a way to shrink transistor contacts without reducing performance of the nanotube devices.

A new kind of metal was used to make contact between the nanotubes and wires, it runs channels straight into the sides of the wires. Conventional methods run those channels under the wires. By running the channels into the sides of the wires scientists were able to shrink the channel dimensions to less than 10nm, shrinking the overall size of the transistors without shrinking performance. IBM hasn't perfected the technique yet and more research is needed and will be conducted.

SOURCE: aSmarterPlanet