Stanford Engineers Build First Computer Based on Carbon Nanotube Technology

Mon, 10/07/2013 - 9:27am
Tom Abate, Stanford Engineering






"People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon," said Mitra, an electrical engineer and computer scientist and Chambers Faculty Scholar of Engineering. "But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology. Here is the proof."






Max Shulaker, doctoral student in electrical engineering at Stanford University, holds a wafer filled with carbon nanotube computers (CNTs). To his left, a basic CNT computer utilizing this technology is sandwiched beneath a probe card to input and output signals.  (Norbert von der Groeben)It was roughly 15 years ago that carbon nanotubes were first fashioned into transistors, the on-off switches at the heart of digital electronic systems.




As Mitra said: "It’s not just about the CNT computer. It’s about a change in directions that shows you can build something real using nanotechnologies that move beyond silicon and its cousins."

Why worry about a successor to silicon?













A second type of imperfection has also stymied CNT technology.






Bypassing the misaligned nanotubes required even greater subtlety.


"This ‘imperfections-immune design’ (technique) makes this discovery truly exemplary," said Sankar Basu, a program director at the National Science Foundation.






Professor Georges Gielen, Vice Rector of Science, Engineering and Technology at the Katholieke Universiteit in Leuven, Belgium, said the next generation of electronics, including wireless sensor networks and other tiny devices envisioned as part of the “Internet of things,” require low-power, high performance chips.

“A big challenge for the massive deployment of such systems is the powering: wire line supply is impossible, batteries often not practical or affordable,” Gielen said, adding: “CNTs are an emerging technology that offer the potential to cut down significantly, by orders of magnitude, on the power consumption of electronics compared to today’s state-of-the-art technologies. If this materializes, this will be a major breakthrough for all the mentioned and future applications.”

For more information visit http://engineering.stanford.edu.

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