Major breakthrough in microchip technology

IBM scientists are reporting progress in a chip-making technology that is likely to ensure the shrinking of the basic digital switch at the heart of modern microchips for more than another decade. The advance, first described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on unday, is based on carbon nanotubes, e!otic molecules that have long held out promise as an alternative material to silicon from which to create the tiny logic gates that are now used by the billions to create microprocessors and memory chips. The IBM researchers at the T.". #atson $esearch %entre in &orktown 'eights, (ew &ork, have been able to pattern an array of carbon nanotubes on the surface of a silicon wafer and use them to build chips that are hybrids of silicon and carbon nanotubes with more than )*,*** working transistors. +gainst all e!pectations, the silicon chip has continued to improve in both speed and capacity for the last five decades. In recent decades, however, there has been growing uncertainty over whether the technology will continue to improve. The end of the microelectronics era would inevitably stall a growing array of industries that have fed off the falling cost and increasing performance of computer chips. %hip makers have routinely doubled the number of transistors that can be etched on the surface of silicon wafers by routinely shrinking the tiny switches that store and route the ones and ,eros that are processed by digital computers. They have long since shrunk the switches to less than a wavelength of light, and they are rapidly approaching dimensions that can be measured in terms of the widths of just a few atoms.

The process has been characterised as Moore-s .aw, named after /ordon Moore, the Intel co-founder, who in )012 noted that the industry was doubling the number of transistors it could build on a single chip at routine intervals of )3 to )4 months. To continue the process, semiconductor engineers have had to consistently perfect an array of related manufacturing systems and materials that continue to perform at an ever tinier scale. In recent years, while chip makers have continued to double the number of transistors on microprocessors and memory chips, their performance, measured as 5clock speed,6 has largely stalled. This has forced the computer industry to change its design and begin building more parallel computers. Today, even smartphone microprocessors come with as many as four processors, or 5cores6, which are used to break up tasks so they can be processed simultaneously. IBM scientists said they believed that once they have perfected the use of carbon nanotubes sometime after the end of this decade, it will be possible to dramatically raise the speed of future chips as well as dramatically increase the number of transistors. This year, IBM researchers published a separate paper describing the speedup made possible by the new material. 5These devices outperformed any other switches made from any other material,6 said upratik /uha, director of physical sciences at IBM $esearch. 5#e had suspected this all along, and our device physicists had simulated this, and they showed that we would see a factor of five or more performance improvement over conventional silicon devices.6 %arbon nanotubes are essentially single sheets of carbon rolled into nanoscale tubes. The IBM researchers described how they were able to

place ultra-small rectangles of the material in regular arrays by placing them in a soapy mi!ture that makes them soluble in water. They used a process they described as 5chemical self-assembly6 to create the patterned array in which the nanotubes stick in some areas of the surface while others are left untouched. 7erfecting the process will re8uire a more highly purified form of the carbon nanotube material. .ess pure forms are metallic and are not good semiconductors, Mr. /uha said. 'e said that Bell .abs scientists figured out ways to purify germanium, a metal in the carbon group, chemically similar to silicon, in the )09*s to make the first transistors, and he was confident that IBM scientists would be able to make 00.00 per cent pure carbon nanotubes in the future. New York Times News Service The NewYork Times adds: Because of an editing error, the article above defined incorrectly Moores Law, an observation on technology advances named for Gordon Moore, a co-founder of Intel. Moores Law holds that the chi industry doubles the number of transistors it can build on a single chi at routine intervals of about two years ! not intervals of about "# to "$ months.