Carbon Nanotubule Transistors May Soon Give Waning Moore’s Law a Boost

erek

erek

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"Fabrication of carbon nanotube field-effect transistors in commercial silicon manufacturing facilities"

"Carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFETs) are a promising nanotechnology for the development of energy-efficient computing. Despite rapid progress, CNFETs have only been fabricated in academic or research laboratories. A critical challenge in transferring this technology to commercial manufacturing facilities is developing a suitable method for depositing nanotubes uniformly over industry-standard large-area substrates. Such a deposition method needs to be manufacturable, compatible with today’s silicon-based technologies, and provide a path to achieving systems with energy efficiency benefits over silicon. Here, we show that a deposition technique in which the substrate is submerged within a nanotube solution can address these challenges and can allow CNFETs to be fabricated within industrial facilities. By elucidating the mechanisms driving nanotube deposition, we develop process modifications to standard solution-based methods that significantly improve throughput, accelerating the deposition process by more than 1,100 times, while simultaneously reducing cost. This allows us to fabricate CNFETs in a commercial silicon manufacturing facility and high-volume semiconductor foundry. We demonstrate uniform and reproducible CNFET fabrication across industry-standard 200 mm wafers, employing the same equipment currently being used to fabricate silicon product wafers."

https://singularityhub.com/2020/06/...tors-may-soon-give-waning-moores-law-a-boost/
 
Always see lots of articles about the next great technology in electronics. None of them seem to go anywhere. Still using silicon chips and lithium-ion batteries for a half century now. Been seeing three or four articles a year about something supplanting that for many years, but still has not happened. Though a new envisioned tech is better in various ways, it always comes down to to production cost and production output. Hard to beat the current tech in those areas.
 
Yeah, would be great to see them used, but will require too much change in toolchain to utilize effectively. And I don't think CNTs get around the optical scaling limits ( they just have better electrical characteristics at smaller sizes).

Not going to save the world, no matter how many times people proclaim they will..
 
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Optimistically they are still a decade away, 2 decades being more reasonable. The tech just doesn't exist at this point to be able to do anything large scale with them and the start up costs on that tech are going to be insane, I don't see this getting the attention it needs until Intel and TSMC get desperate which they aren't yet, they still have a long way to go with Silicon
 
Lakados said:
Optimistically they are still a decade away, 2 decades being more reasonable. The tech just doesn't exist at this point to be able to do anything large scale with them and the start up costs on that tech are going to be insane, I don't see this getting the attention it needs until Intel and TSMC get desperate which they aren't yet, they still have a long way to go with Silicon
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Considering IBM was getting into this 24+ years ago I suspect they will have product before TSMC and Intel do. They tend to do that for some reason.
 
Verge said:
eventually, somebody is gonna make a real product out of carbon nanotubes, i just know it!
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Same with graphene and carbyne. I'm sure my great grandkids will be reading about how those materials are going to revolutionize batteries in 2095.
 
NeoNemesis said:
Same with graphene and carbyne. I'm sure my great grandkids will be reading about how those materials are going to revolutionize batteries in 2095.
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it's almost like materials sciences are advanced or something....
 
erek said:
Such a deposition method needs to be manufacturable, compatible with today’s silicon-based technologies, and provide a path to achieving systems with energy efficiency benefits over silicon.
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See, this is the problem. Just like gasoline combustion engines - there's no thinking outside the box. "Make the existing technology more efficient so we don't have to retool shit." WRONG! Start from scratch. Find new methods and technologies from the ground up. Innovate and reinvent! Otherwise you'll spend decades trying to fit that square peg into that round hole.
 
Grimlakin said:
Considering IBM was getting into this 24+ years ago I suspect they will have product before TSMC and Intel do. They tend to do that for some reason.
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IBM from 25 years ago was a lot different company than they are now. In the last decade, they've cut research, sold off their fabs, outsourced a third of their workforce to India.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/28/technology/ibm-india.html

It's hard enough to make progress in cutting-edge materials science; it's much harder when your CEO gives-up and makes you a purely AI and services company.

But that tells you how much of a money sink most of these turned out to be! If you're not a cutting-edge fab with tons of revenue, you're not going ti crack this one.
 
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Traditional silicon is far from the only other dog in this fight. For carbon
nano-tube transistors to matter, they will also have to beat advances in:
Strained Silicon Transistors
Silicon Carbide Transistors
Silicon Germanium Transistors
Gallium Arsenide Transistors
Gallium Nitride Transistors
Vacuum Channel Transistors
Optics
Spintronics
Twistronics
Parametrons
Tunnel Diodes
Quantum Dots
and I probably missed several.

Not saying practical, just saying more competitors than silicon.
Here's a weird example, though it looks more relay to me...
 
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