Carbon nanotube chips could lead to
pocket-sized super computers
Researchers claim that theoretical 3D chip stack that interleaves
next-gen memory and logic technologies using carbon nanotubes which could lead
to pocket-sized super computers.
H.S. Philip Wong, Stanford University’s Professor of Electrical
Engineering, recently talked about the future of computing power at a recent
Semicon West conference. Wong stated in his talk that the material faces huge
technical challenges, but the idea is that the interleaving of layers of
resistive and magnetic RAM with logical layers made from 1D and 2D field effect
transistors could result in a computing system that would theoretically be as
powerful as the IBM Watson super computer, but in pocket-sized form.
"This design requires new, high-efficiency heat spreaders—the
thermal aspect is critically important," he said. "The resulting
design could provide a thousand-fold power reduction for the IBM system that
consumed 175kW power to beat human contestants in the Jeopardy game show. That
system packed 2,880 IBM Power 7 cores running at 3.5GHz delivering 80TFLOPS.
All the content was loaded into Watson's DRAM, not hard drives, because so much
energy is spent in moving data," said Wong.
Wong states three challenges in using the technology: "The material
is not suitable for the high-temperature doping processes used in today’s chip
fabs. Researchers still need to improve the purity of the material they grow.
And, like all transistor materials, it faces challenges when contacts scale to
increasingly small sizes."
Other companies are also exploring ways to utilize carbon nanotubes in
order to advance computing technology. IBM recently announced that they have
plans to produce the first commercial carbon nanotube chips by early 2020. The
company is planning to invest I $3 billion over a period of five years to
develop processors that are much smaller, tightly packed electronics that will
be able to sustain computing progress in the longer run. IBM is also working on
graphene to create a chip that is only 1 atom thick and could run your
smartphone run longer.
Samsung is working on
Graphene -synthesis to develop lighter and flexible
electronic devices. Graphene which is one of the strongest and most durable
materials on the planet is made of densely packed carbon atoms in a hexagonal
lattice. Researchers at Samsung have developed a new method to create
high-quality graphene on silicon wafers, that could lead to mass production of
graphene transistors.
Source: EEtasia
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