Carbon Nantubes to Replace Silicon at 10nm?

[Arthur Hanson]

IBM?s Carbon Nanotube Advancement Offers New Hope for Replacing Silicon | MIT Technology Review

Any thoughts or comments on this? Could this be a fundumental shift in the semi sector? Will grahene and similar 2d structures change everything in the next few years? Much to ponder, think and act on. After over five years of research in this area, I finally feel its time is coming. My next area of research is self assembly from a DNA like print, just how life is made. Tremendous strides are being made in man designed life forms. They have recently got them to reproduce, but haven't been able to boot life yet. They overlay dominant genes over a simple life form and convert it to an entirely man designed life form, Craig Venter did this a few years ago. Will bio and semi technology someday merge?

 

[astilo]

Well, at 10nm the game is already over. 7nm is also feasible with the old and dear silicon. Below 7nm, everything is instead possible.

"7nm node has remained out of reach due to a number of fundamental technology barriers," says IBM, with the most notable among them being the material properties of silicon itself. IBM's group of collaborators, which includes Samsung and the SUNY Polytechnic Institute, replaced pure silicon with a silicon-germanium (SiGe) alloy for the channel transistors to improve electron mobility at that minuscule scale. It also employed Extreme Ultraviolet (EUV) lithography to etch the microscopic patterns into each chip.

IBM?s 7nm chip breakthrough points to smaller, faster processors | The Verge

 

[Daniel Payne]

From the article, "having carbon nanotube technology ready by 2020". Five years is a long time and I wish them success along the way.

 

[Daniel Nenni]

IBM seems to be leading the way here:

IBM Research: Carbon nanotubes at 9 nm

 

[Brad Pierce]

"Carbon-nanotube-based RAM ... seems to have unique inherent characteristics of high reliability (such as 1,000 years of data retention at 85°C) and unlimited endurance cycles (due to its robust switching mechanism).", according to Tsugio Makimoto in "Implications of Makimoto's Wave" in the Dec. 2013 issue of Computer. The full context is as follows

The decade beginning in 2017 will differ from the current one because, for many applications, chip integration density will be too high for the customized approach. An industry-wide effort is underway to develop products with high flexibility, high performance, low power, and low cost in order to cover a wide range of system applications, a trend that can be referred to as highly-flexible super-integration, or HFSI. Altera's programmable silicon convergence is one example of this approach because, with it, a chip contains multiple functional units such as MPU, DSP, and FPGA and therefore capitalizes on the next decade's increase in integration desnity. This presents an interesting challenge because some level of redundancy will be justifiable compared to the high cost of custom design.

Nonvolatile RAM is another emerging technology that will contribute to HFSI's realization. Simply stated, NV-RAM has the combined features of RAM and nonvolatile memory. If it is realized, the result will be signficant changes in the way chips and electronic systems are designed: first, the memory hierarchy will be quite different from today's systems because NV-RAM can replace SRAM, DRAM, and flash memory, resulting in improved performance and reduced power consumption; second, logic functions will be constructed by the array of NV-RAM, providing a higher level of flexibility.

Although several types of NV-RAM have been pursued so far, promising NV-RAM technologies currently under development include ReRAM (resistive RAM), STT-MRAM (spin-transfer torque magnetic RAM), and CNT-RAM (carbon-nanotube-based RAM). Although each technology has both positive and negative aspects, CNT-RAM, the newest entrant, seems to have unique inherent characteristics of high reliability (such as 1,000 years of data retention at 85°C) and unlimited endurance cycles (due to its robust switching mechanism). NV-RAM will be a powerful HFSI enabler and will contribute significantly to computing and IT progress in general.

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The video version is Implications of Makimoto's Wave - YouTube .

 

[mhagmann]

It has been known for some time that SWCNT are effective transmission lines at microwave through terahertz frequencies, and unique microwave devices have been made using them for optical switching [1]. As I said at ASMC-2015, once we begin to consider the possibilities for new devices based on CNT it is possible that clock rates for computing may be increased to the terahertz range.
[1] "Isolated carbon nanotubes as high-impedance transmission lines for microwave through terahertz frequencies," IEEE Trans. Nanotech. 4 (2005) 289-296.