World's first Carbon Nanotube based Computer

A Carbon Nanotube with its unique properties are a big breakthrough for electronics. Due to their thermal conductivity, mechanical and electrical properties, they find applications as additives to various structural materials. A team of Stanford engineers have taken this and built a basic computer harnessing the huge energy conservation capabilities and thereby promising to extend 'Moore's Law' for years to come.

Intel co-founder Gordon Moore's 1965 prediction that computer circuitry will keep getting smaller and cheaper to produce has held up. But as integrated circuits (ICs) keep getting more densely populated with transistors, the large amounts of heat they dissipate have prompted concerns over whether silicon can be used for many more generations of transistor shrinkage.



"People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon. But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology. Here is the proof," Mitra said in a statement.






Mihail Roco, senior advisor for Nanotechnology at the National Science Foundation, called the Stanford work "an important, scientific breakthrough". The research was led by Stanford professors Subhasish Mitra and H.S. Philip Wong.

Challenges for the 28nm half node: Is the optical shrink dead?

A half-node process has been routinely used to deliver incremental improvements in process control and hardware availability in order to continue Moore's Law. Traditionally, due to the imaging requirements, parameters such as numerical aperture and partial coherence were not set to their maximum resolution settings, thus leaving room in hardware and RET recipes to accommodate incremental imaging requirements. However, as hardware availability and computational lithography methods are stressed to the maximum of their capabilities to deliver the next technology nodes, it is worth asking the question if such optical shrinks continue to be viable moving forward. Already 28nm layouts scaled down from the original 32nm layouts are starting to show signs of configuration limitations dictated by the available imaging hardware. In this paper its is shown that two-dimensional features determine the feasibility of migrating successfully to the next half-node even when one-dimensional metrics suggest that such migration should be possible.

Moore's Law: 43 Years and counting

In 1965, Gordon Moore sat down to pen his article for a Electronics Magazine and this is when he saw some fundamental drivers in the Integrated circuits. Little did he know how powerful his vision would be, or the longevity of what others would come to call a law. Forty year later, in celebration of his birthday, the semiconductor industry association devoted its annual report to Moore's law. They searched the world for the top two Moore's law scholars: one from the industry and one from the academia. they then commissioned these scholars to write two papers that describe Moore's law, its history, its economics and its impact on the world.



Moore's original statement that transistor counts had doubled every year can be found in his publication "Cramming more components onto integrated circuits", Electronics Magazine 19 April 1965:

The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year ... Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.

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