Our ability to continuously shrink the features of our silicon-based processors appears to be a thing of the past, which has materials scientists considering ways to move beyond silicon. The top candidate is the carbon nanotube, which naturally comes in semiconducting forms, has fantastic electrical properties, and is extremely small. Unfortunately, it has proven extremely hard to grow the nanotubes where they’re needed and just as difficult to manipulate them to place them in the right location. There has been some progress in working around these challenges, but the results have typically been shown in rather limited demonstrations.
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. Performance is nothing to write home about, but the processor successfully executed a variation of the traditional programming demo, “Hello world!” It’s an impressive bit of work, but not all of the researchers’ solutions are likely to lead to high-performance processors.
The rate of progress on this particular technology is astounding.
Not even impressed by such bold claims that “Unfortunately, it has proven extremely hard to grow the nanotubes where they’re needed and just as difficult to manipulate them to place them in the right location”.
https://www.wired.com/2009/09/gallery-atomic-science/
https://www.ibm.com/blogs/research/2013/05/how-to-move-an-atom/
Where are the 3D atom printers by now ?
Moving atoms one at a time is not going to make processors commercially. Remember, there’s 5×10^22 Si atoms per cm^3. Think of how long it would take to move that many atoms one at a time…
I understand that, but it’s been 30 years of thousands of engineers fidgeting with atoms and nanotube aren’t particularly that large, I bet 2019 atom printers would be able to manipulate those tubes. Or a similar process than UV etching would be used to magnetize a substrate with polarized light or so, then deposit nanotube in one direction, change the polarization, add more tubes in another direction, etc.
I like those last couple ideas. I imagine that folks are working on that – it’s worth many billions to whomever solves this issue. The kind of money involved means it can’t be ignored.
Indeed