Building Complex Circuits With Carbon Nanotubes 42
Lorien_the_first_one writes "MIT's Technology Review reports that carbon nanotubes are being used to fabricate complex circuits. From the article, 'The first three-dimensional carbon nanotube circuits, made by researchers at Stanford University, could be an important step in making nanotube computers that could be faster and use less power than today's silicon chips. Such a computer is still at least 10 years off, but the Stanford work shows it is possible to make stacked circuits using carbon nanotubes. Stacked circuits cram more processing power in a given area, and also do a better job dissipating waste heat.'"
Re:So this means 3-D processors, right? (Score:3, Informative)
From the FA:
"A recent IBM study showed that for a given total power consumption, a circuit made from carbon nanotubes is five times faster than a silicon circuit"
And:
"The Stanford group is currently working to make ever more complex integrated circuits. "So far as complexity is concerned, there is fundamentally no barrier" on carbon nanotubes, says Mitra."
So at least in theory not only can the designs be updated as you mentioned, but they should be able to get pretty crazy with said designs.
So in 10 years? (Score:5, Informative)
progress, kind of (Score:3, Informative)
These are more or less the same techniques we used in carbon nanotechnology 10 years ago. The difference is that now there are more than 2 or 3 groups capable of mastering all these techniques. It's nice to see everyone hasn't given up on this material and that engineers have taken over now that all the scientists have moved on to graphene. It's still far too expensive to make transistors from carbon nanotubes, but maybe they're right and these labor-intensive techniques used can be automated.