You may have heard of Moore’s Law, which says that the number of transistors that can be put in a computer chip doubles every 18 months. That “law” has held true for four decades, successfully predicting the rapid evolution of computers and smartphones.
However, it’s not a law like, say, Boyle’s Law, which is an inviolable tenet of physics. Moore’s Law is just a prediction, and it’s about to collide with those real physical laws in the next few years as transistors approach the limit of how small they can get. What then?
IBM has an answer in the form of a relatively new technology: carbon nanotubes. Each tube is an atom thick, rolled up in a cylinder (one is shown above). Carbon nanotubes actually conduct electricity better than silicon, have the perfect shape to act as a transistor and, most importantly, can scale smaller.
However, they’re also much harder to work with, which is why no one’s pursued the tech until recently. They have to be aligned perfectly and metallic impurities, which naturally occur, must be completely removed.
IBM has met those challenges, however, not only creating a 10,000-transistor-strong processor based on carbon nanotubes, but doing it with standard semiconductor techniques. That means, should today’s chipmakers end up switching to the technology, they wouldn’t have to spend billions creating new tools and production facilities.
It would also mean Moore’s Law could get a new lease on life, just through a different technology. And the gadget market, which has been reliant on introducing newer and more powerful gadgets year after year, should be safe for another decade at least.
