The semiconductor industry is beginning to exhaust their wild: the microchip fabrication technologies try to integrate more and more transistors into less space to further demonstrate the validity of Moore's Law, but the physical limits of the law is threatening their validity .





But a group of scientists from IBM have found a way to extend the life cycle of that reduction scales integration. The use of carbon nanotubes to create these transistors poses is a promising alternative for the future.

Atomic widths

This advance will connect cables ultrathin metal nanotubes, and that would make it possible to reduce the width of these cables without the electrical resistance. Both that heat resistance and increase when the cables are getting smaller, and that is also an obstacle to the working frequencies of the chips made with these transistors.





This research will allow the beginning of the next decade so it will be possible to reduce the size of the point of contact between carbon nanotubes and ultrathin only 40 atoms wide cables. After this, the researchers comment, that width may be reduced to 28 atoms.





Researchers say that carbon nanotubes are "excellent candidates for improved performance and energy efficiency of future computing systems", and is expected to return this technique allows to take new steps in the development of processors and more powerful chips in the next years.

Sources: dailymail