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New Generation Non-silicon Microprocessors

Click Here For A Diagramatic Representation Of The Making Of Nano Technology.

IBM researchers will help pave the way for the next era in the evolution of the microprocessor- beyond silicon. Physicists from IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center announced their fabrication of the world's first array of transistors made from Carbon Nanotubes.

The announcement recalls the breakthroughs of the late 1940s, when scientists first began developing the bipolar transistor, the device that spawned the microchip age.

The development in nanotechnology, the manipulation of molecular structures, will allow IBM (NYSE: IBM) to more easily create groups of transistors from tiny cylinders called Carbon Nanotubes.

The Nanotube is a long hollow cylindrical molecule composed of carbon and with a typical width of only 10 times the size of an individual atom. IBM believes that nanotubes, which measure 5 atoms to 10 atoms wide and are 10,000 times narrower than a human hair, are the most promising replacement material for silicon to develop advanced chips in the coming decades. Since they're a thousand times stronger than steel and can serve as both transistors and wires, Nanotubes may indeed be the ultimate last step in conventional computing technology before the realm of the quantum computer.

Sumio Iijima, a researcher with NEC, discovered nanotubes in 1991. Scientists later discovered they could be manufactured in mass quantities.

IBM's achievement, to be detailed Friday in the journal Science, has allowed the computer giant to automatically produce pure semiconductor surfaces from nanotubes without the chip-frying metallic impurities that plagued earlier efforts. Silicon has been the basis for manufacturing processors, memory and other chips for years. However, it is expected to reach its limits within 10 years. That's because manufacturers must continue to shrink the size of the components printed on chips to cram more into a given space, thereby increasing performance.

Many researchers view Nanotechnology materials as the next big jump in the semiconductor evolution because they offer smaller, more electrically conductive building blocks for processors. Nanotechnology would allow materials to be produced on a very small scale but in much higher volumes and at lower costs than traditional materials and manufacturing processes.


But Nano-Technology, like any new technology, faces a number of obstacles before it will be ready for everyday use. The technology, for example, allows large amounts of materials to be produced inexpensively. But it also tends to produce more imperfections in a given area than silicon, said one researcher. The trouble is when Nanotubes are fabricated -- typically involving laser heating of carbon soot -- only some of the end product is the desired semiconductor Nanotubes. The same recipe also produces a cohort of metallic Nanotubes, which can't be used to make a transistor. The metallic parts, if left in the mix, would short-circuit a transistor. Without any other way of separating them, researchers were forced to assemble nanotube transistors by hand. Any attempt to build a nanotube circuit has involved the painstaking process of cherry picking the desired semiconductors one by one using atomic force microscopes. This is just one issue that must be solved through research or addressed with new ways of manufacturing.

But while studying the effects of electrical currents on nanotubes, IBM discovered that with the right voltage, it could incinerate the metallic tubes, leaving only the semiconductors needed to build chip transistors. "They've come up with a recipe that anyone can follow that will allow you to make many thousands of these transistors simultaneously on a silicon substrate," said IBM's Theis. "With the proper sequence of electrical pulses, we're able to fuse out the tubes that are wires -- the ones we don't want -- and pick out the ones that are semiconducting."

IBM believes that this work will lead to new research that will help establish Nanotubes as the most worthy successor to silicon. "We are already working on simple circuits," Phaedon Avouris, manager of nanometer-scale science at IBM Research, was quoted saying. These groups of Nanotube transistors will ultimately become the ancestors of full-blown processors and memory chips based on nanotubes.

While solving the metallic issue is an important achievement, IBM and other researchers acknowledge that it's just one obstacle in a succession of barriers researchers must confront before nanotechnology chips are ready for the market. "I would say a development effort will begin within three years," Avouris said. "A major issue is not just technological. It must be economically possible" as well, he said.

Nanotechnology researchers at Harvard applauded IBM's work, characterizing it as a major step on a long road. "It will take several years and additional breakthroughs before nanochips become as prevalent as silicon chips are today," said Harvard Professor Charles Lieber. A possible shortcut, Lieber said, is the development of hybrid silicon-nanotechnology chips. Hybrid chips could be ready in about five years, he said, while pure nanochips will likely come within a decade.


Hybrid chips would be extremely dense, allowing substantial gains in processor speeds or the amount of data a memory chip can hold. One of the first hybrids will likely be a memory chip with fundamental elements, such as memory addressing, that uses silicon. Meanwhile, the area of the chip where data is stored would be constructed using nanotechnology. For hybrid processors, nanotechnology memory could be used to add a tiny, extremely dense memory cache to a server chip.

"We are already working on integration," Avouris said. Nanotech-only chips would come after the hybrids were perfected. "I think nanoscale is certainly the future of electronics," Lieber said. "But I do think there are a lot of significant problems to have addressed with a significant impact on what's really going to (happen) in the future."


For a picture explaining the making of these microprocessors, please click here.

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