IFC researchers demonstrate that nanotube wires operating at speed of commercial chips.
Chipmakers have hoped that carbon “nanotubes” would allow them to continue using thinner wiring as they pack more devices into chips. In a paper published online today by the journal Nano Letters, engineers at Stanford University report using nanotubes to wire a silicon chip operating at speeds comparable to those of commercially available processors and memory.
“This is the first time anyone has been able to show digital signals going through nanotubes at 1 gigahertz,” said H.-S. Philip Wong, a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford and a co-author of the report.
The advance shows that nanotubes are not only capable of connecting transistors at industrially relevant speed, but of doing so in real circuits that use materials, designs and manufacturing processes compatible with those that chipmakers use today, added Gael Close, an electrical engineering doctoral student and the paper’s lead author.
The silicon chip is an array of 256 circuits called “ring oscillators,” which are industry-standard circuits for testing the speed of chips. Including other control circuitry that allowed for selectively operating each of the 256 oscillators, the chip comprised a total of 11,000 transistors in an area one hundredth of a square inch. For more information go here. |
