There has been for several years talking that nanotube transistors are coming to use and they can be better than traditional transistors made of silicon. I see this news as a major milestone.
IEEE Spectrum writes:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/nanoclast/semiconductors/processors/modern-microprocessor-built-using-carbon-nanotubes
Engineers at MIT and Analog Devices have created the first fully-programmable 16-bit carbon nanotube microprocessor RV16X-NANO.
It’s the most complex integration of carbon nanotube-based CMOS logic so far, with nearly 15,000 transistors. Another thing to note that it was manufactured using technologies that have already been proven to work in a commercial chip-manufacturing facility.
Science News writes:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chip-carbon-nanotubes-not-silicon-marks-computing-milestone
By devising techniques to overcome the nanoscale defects that often undermine individual nanotube transistors (SN: 7/19/17), researchers have created the first computer chip that uses thousands of these switches to run programs.
The resulting microprocessor executed a classic simple program to write the message, “Hello, world!”
The prototype is described in the Aug. 29 Nature. It is not yet as speedy or as small as commercial silicon devices, but still a very promising proof of concept.
4 Comments
Tomi Engdahl says:
Now, researchers have used carbon nanotubes to make a general purpose, RISC-V-compliant processor that handles 32-bit instructions and does 16-bit memory addressing.
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/19/08/28/2237234/16-bit-risc-v-processor-made-with-carbon-nanotubes?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Slashdot%2Fslashdot%2Fto+%28%28Title%29Slashdot+%28rdf%29%29
Tomi Engdahl says:
RISC-V Microprocessor Constructed with Carbon Nanotubes
https://blog.hackster.io/risc-v-microprocessor-constructed-with-carbon-nanotubes-75c1a6dc3921
Tomi Engdahl says:
http://www.epanorama.net/newepa/2017/01/18/can-risc-v-linux-of-microprocessors-start-an-open-hardware-renaissance/
Tomi Engdahl says:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/chip-carbon-nanotubes-not-silicon-marks-computing-milestone