The Rising Influence of Rising Affluence

[DewDiligence]

More on the same story from today’s NYT:

http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/28/i-b-m-reports-nanotube-chip-breakthrough/

I.B.M. scientists are reporting progress in a chip making technology that is likely to ensure the shrinking of the size of the basic digital switch at the heart of modern microchips for more than another decade.

The advance, first described in the journal Nature Nanotechnology on Sunday, is based on carbon nanotubes, exotic molecules that have long held out promise as an alternative material to silicon from which to create the tiny logic gates that are now used by the billions to create microprocessors and memory chips. The I.B.M. researchers at the T.J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., have been able to pattern an array of carbon nanotubes on the surface of a silicon wafer and use them to build chips that are hybrids of silicon and carbon nanotubes with more than 10,000 working transistors.

…The I.B.M. advance is significant, scientists said, because the chip making industry has not yet found a way forward beyond the next two or three generations of silicon. “This is terrific. I’m really excited about this,” said Subhasish Mitra, a Stanford University electrical engineering professor who specializes in carbon nanotube materials. The promise of the new material, he said is that not only will carbon nanotubes allow chip makers to build smaller transistors, but it is likely they will turn off and on more quickly as well.

…I.B.M. scientists said they believed that once they have perfected the use of carbon nanotubes sometime after the end of this decade, it will be possible to dramatically raise the speed of future chips as well as dramatically increase the number of transistors.