IBM Transistors Made Of Nanotubes Could Replace Silicon, In Ever-Tinier Computer Chips
Logic Gates From Carbon Nanotubes IBM via ExtremeTechSilicon can't keep up with our demand for smaller and faster chips, but IBM researchers may have found a way to continue accelerating chip performance with a whole new kind of transistor. As silicon microchips get smaller and manufacturers pack more and more transistors onto each individual chip, Moore's Law--the optimistic observation that the microchip industry doubles the number of transistors it can build on a single chip every 12 to 18 months--becomes a little more difficult to maintain. But IBM researchers are reporting a breakthrough in transistor technology that could allow them to further reduce the size of logic gates--the fundamental digital switches on the modern microchip--and therefore continue shrinking microchips for another decade or more, enabling our gadgets to continue growing faster, more powerful, and (hopefully) more efficient. Logic gates are the tiny switches that actually store and route the digital ones...