Breakthrough at IBM for faster, smaller chips

Researchers at IBM made ​​a breakthrough: They were the first to order over 10,000 functioning carbon nano tube transistors in a chip test and precise. The material to replace silicon in the future and to the commercial production of significantly smaller, faster and more powerful computer chips lead.

Carbon nano tubes constitute a new class of semiconductor materials with particularly advantageous electrical properties, IBM said in a press release. This is particularly true with regard to future transistors, the channel length in the range lies a few nanometers. Electrons could move faster in carbon nano tubes than in silicon, which enables higher performance transistors. Because of their shape, the nano tubes are also ideal for use in transistors.

Silicon Successor for smaller components

Carbon-based switching elements for processors have the potential to replace the conventional silicon technology, so IBM. Finally they allowed the further miniaturization of computer components. IBM researching on just such a chip technologies. "For carbon nanotubes, the challenges lie in the required high purity and precise placement of the tubes in the nanometer range. Both of these areas, we have achieved significant progress," said Supratik Guha, Head of Physical Sciences at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center in New York.
  
Until now, scientists had only succeeded in placing several hundred carbon nanotubes simultaneously, IBM says. This was, however, not nearly enough to use them in future chips with billions of transistors. The researchers of the group is using a new approach now succeeded but a large number of nanotubes with a hundred times higher density than previously possible to arrange to predefined locations on a chip.