New IBM discovery sets carbon nanotubes to drive the future of processors

Until now, virtually all of today’s processors--be it those used in smartphones to the ones that drive large-scale datacenters--are fabricated using silicon. Silicon has long since proved to be the material of choice for creating the building blocks of these chips--the transistor--the sub-components used to design all of the complex circuitry that comprises todays processors.

Over the past several decades, scientists have been laboring at finding ways to shrink down the size of these transistors so they can pack more of them into a given size of silicon wafer, thereby designing processors with better capabilities, which run faster, all the while utilizing less power. But given the limitations of the molecular structure of silicon, scientists foresee running into a limit to how tiny these transistors can be created using this medium.

Enter carbon nanotubes.

In a paper published in the journal Science, scientists at IBM announced they had discovered a method of fabricating carbon nanotubes with shorter contact lengths--a key factor that affects the performance of transistors. They brought this contact length down to 9 nanometers without increasing the resistance of the contact itself. With traditional silicon-based processors, the current state of the art has this length at 25 nanometers. Being able to lower this contact length without increasing resistance is the holy grail in packing more transistors into a processor.

With the scale is all so small, this is actually a huge breakthrough that could be momentous in creating the next generation of processors created using carbon nanotubes instead of silicon, where the smaller contact length could translate into processors with more features, that run faster, and significantly cooler than their silicon-based counterparts.

Carbon nanotubes have been finding numerous applications in fields as diverse as material science and medicine, with these tubes being approximately 10,000 times thinner than a human hair and extremely strong and resilient. Coupled with their electrical properties, scientists are betting they could power the next wave of more powerful, yet power-efficient, computers.

Commercial carbon nanotube based processors are still a ways away from commercial availability though. Challenges such as creating high-enough yields to make them viable and fabricating these nanotubes on wafers are two of the many issues that need to be surmounted. But this breakthrough sets the tone for a future that promises computers that are significantly faster and mobile devices that can outlast anything we have today.