IBM claims carbon nanotube IC breakthrough

IBM claims carbon nanotube IC breakthrough

SAN FRANCISCO—Researchers from IBM Corp. have demonstrated a new approach to carbon nanotechnology that they say opens up the path for commercial fabrication of chips with transistors made of carbon nanotubes.

Many believe that carbon nanotubes will one day replace silicon technology in semiconductors, enabling the continued scaling of chips to smaller feature sizes. Carbon nanotubes have electrical properties that are more attractive than silicon, particularly for building nanoscale transistor devices that are a few tens of atoms across, scientists say.

Claiming a first, IBM (Armonk, N.Y.) said its researchers placed more than 10,000 working nanotube transistors on a single device using standard semiconductor processes. Previously, according to IBM, scientists have been able to place at most a few hundred carbon nanotube devices at a time, not nearly enough to address key issues for commercial applications.

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According to IBM, the new approach paves the way for circuit fabrication with large numbers of carbon nanotube transistors at predetermined substrate positions. Eventually, more than 1 billion nanotube transistors will be needed for future integration into commercial chips, IBM said.


IBM researcher Hongsik Park looks over wafer with 10,000 carbon nanotubes. The wafer was tested in a commercial fab setting at IBM.
Credit: IBM Research/Flickr link

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