Thursday, July 14, 2016

Carbon nanotube circuits

Current (FET) transistors have driven the computer age nearly since its inception. In spite of their death having been predicted many times, they are finally reaching their limits -- physics is a hard limit.  Transistors based on carbon nanotubes have been an elusive potential substitute.  This http://spectrum.ieee.org/ article gives a nice overview of the state of the art and indicates that significant progress is being made.  A small 178 transistor circuit that runs has been demonstrated -- even though small that is non-trivial.  One point confuses me: transistors have two properties, they are a switch and they amplify.  Amplification with carbon nanotubes has been an issue and is not mentioned in the article.  Is is so obviously solved that it need not be mentioned or is this optimistic article ignoring that point?

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