Fresh breakthrough means way faster CPUs are closer to reality

By Darren Allan

As you’re probably aware, chipmakers are starting to struggle with silicon these days in terms of making better performing CPUs built on ever-smaller processes – which is why they’re looking at alternatives to silicon such as carbon nanotubes, a field which has just witnessed an important breakthrough.

The advance has been made by scientists at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who say they’ve been able to produce carbon nanotube transistors which outperform today’s silicon transistors considerably, enabling a current that’s 1.9 times higher than that seen with silicon.

The researchers have made important leaps forward in terms of properly aligning the nanotubes on a wafer, and ensuring their purity – saying that eliminating metallic impurities is crucial because these can disrupt the semiconducting properties of the nanotubes (causing something akin to a short in electronics).

One of the project leads, Michael Arnold, noted: “We’ve identified specific conditions in which you can get rid of nearly all metallic nanotubes, where we have less than 0.01% metallic nanotubes.”

Five times as fast

Theoretically, carbon nanotube transistors should be able to outperform silicon to the tune of being five times faster, or to use five times less energy when it comes to devices which will benefit from …read more

Source:: techradar.com – Computing Components