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Intel Experimenting With Nanotubes

Posted by Zonk on Sat Nov 11, 2006 12:21 AM
from the tuuuubes dept.
Intel Hardware Technology Science
illeism writes "C|Net is reporting on Intel's experimentation with nanotubes in processors. From the article: 'The chip giant has managed to create prototype interconnects — microscopic metallic wires inside of chips that link transistors ... Carbon nanotubes ... conduct electricity far better than metals. In fact, nanotubes exhibit what's called ballistic conductivity, which means that electrons are not scattered or impeded by obstacles.'"
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[+] Science: Nanoknives To Be Used to Cut Cells 78 comments
Roland Piquepaille writes "American researchers have built a carbon nanotube knife. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), this nanoknife will be used to cut and study cells. With this new tool, scientists and biologists will be able to make 3D images of cells and tissues for electron tomography, which requires samples less than 300 nanometers thick. And as cells are usually stored in wax for dissection, the researchers plan to test their nanoknives on a block of wax later this year. But read more for additional references and a picture of this nanoknife."
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  • Someone Alert Ted Stevens! (Score:5, Funny)

    by vought (160908) on Saturday November 11 2006, @12:26AM (#16802878)
    Tubes are ascendant!

    Truly, Ted is a technology genius. It's only a matter of time before these "nano tubes" are implemented to speed delivery of Internet content.

  • Nanotubes? (Score:4, Funny)

    by JFMulder (59706) on Saturday November 11 2006, @12:40AM (#16802936)
    You mean like really really small Internets?

  • Quantum Dots (Score:5, Interesting)

    by googlebear (625615) <<ian> <at> <ianroessle.org>> on Saturday November 11 2006, @12:40AM (#16802940) Homepage
    Hey this is all really interesting stuff ...I think getting Intel behind some of the manufacturing technicalities is a major boon to the industry. Nanotubes, if intel's research confirms this, should prove to be useful in many different applications from mass power distribution to an elevator to the heavens.. who knows .. stay tunes.. also as an interesting side note.. VLSI will hit a rock bottom soon... I did a presentation in my Nanotechnology class last Spring on Quantum Dot Cellular Automata . This uses the electromagnetic repulsion of electons to propegate signals across molecules that are arranged in such a way to form logic gates.. http://www.nd.edu/~qcahome/ [nd.edu] -Ian ian at ianroessle.org
    • It would be a shame if they threw away all of VLSI, as it's not just a digital world -- all of our nice wireless devices require some kind of analog layout, since most of modern communications are based around the concept of wave (not particle) models. QCA definitely sounds interesting, but it's hardly the first attempt at reversible computing. As for Intel: the company is simply benefiting from those marvelous fabs and all of its consortium connections. I suspect that VLSI is going to be with us for a bit
        • I'm a bit confused on this point (only tangentially related): I think that it is the Coulomb force which determines the arrangement of the dots, so are we actually talking about electromagnetic fields, or merely electrostatic/magnetostatic fields? This matters as the former implies a considerable delay, but a generality in terms of the computational model, whereas the latter implies negligible delay. VLSI was founded on the latter for simplicity, but naturally has had to work in the former for a while now (

  • 3D Microprocessors (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AKAImBatman (238306) * <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Saturday November 11 2006, @12:44AM (#16802954) Homepage Journal
    This sounds like it could be of particular use in 3D microprocessor technology. With the number of cores per die ramping up at incredible rates, we're starting to bump into latency issues again. I know that several memory manufacturers (who experinece similar die-space problems) have already switched to layered components to help relieve the issue and keep their dies smaller. But if we can weave nanotubes, we could do a lot more than just stack transistors three or four levels deep. Assuming that a inexpensive manufacturing process were developed, the chip could actually be fashioned in the shape of a cube. The result would make the chip orders of magnitude more dense than the CPUs of today!

    Besides, it would look like a Borg cube under a microscope. How cool is that?!? :P

    • Power is Heat (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TheStonepedo (885845) on Saturday November 11 2006, @12:52AM (#16802988) Homepage Journal
      If you get something running topped-out it may produce some waste heat. Thin chips with only a few layers can rely on a large, flat piece of some kind of substrate attached to a big heat sink and fan. If you make a cube-shaped processor, the innermost parts' heat will have to be dissipated through many other layers of working parts, creating a temperature gradient within the processor. If the innermost parts must be kept below a certain temperature, the outermost must be kept well below that temperature to allow for thermal conduction and the whole thing will have to run very cool relative to today's chips.

      • Re:Power is Heat (Score:5, Informative)

        by AKAImBatman (238306) * <akaimbatman.gmail@com> on Saturday November 11 2006, @01:13AM (#16803076) Homepage Journal
        You are perfectly correct. This is currently one of the challenges facing 3D chip design. That said, there are several properties claimed by the article that would make nanotubes more suitable. First and foremost is that the nanotubes supposedly provide less resistance. Heat != Power per se, but rather the amount of resistance to the power applied. Less resistance == less heat. In addition, the amount of heat generated by resistance is also a function of distance. So the shorter distances provided by 3D nanotubing would provide less heat and overall power usage.

        I'm also tempted to suggest that the empty space between tubings could be flooded with some sort of coolant to eliminate the temperature gradient; but I have my doubts about the feasibility of that. At such a small level, you'd have a lot of difficulty trying to fit atoms into that space. In addition, you'd probably do more to damage the circuitry than heat removal. Still, that doesn't place micro-heatpumps woven into the circuits entirely out of the question. Just mostly. ;)

        In any case, we're already using WAY too much power to keep up these ridiculous clock speeds. Forcing chip-makers to scale the power usage back a bit wouldn't be all that bad of a thing. Especially if they're getting replacement speed increases from the smaller interconnects and lower resistance of the nanotubes.

        • I'm not sure what is used in processors currently, but having the links as nanotubes would help the heat transfer within the material also. Nanotubes have a thermal conductivity of around 2000-3000 W/m/K at normal CPU operating temperatures. This is a huge increase when you compare it to the 149 W/m/K for silicon and 318 W/m/K for gold at room temperature.

          So the increase in thermal conductivity by just having a proportion of the CPU made from nanotubes could possibly be enough to make up for the shape cha

        • Re:Power is Heat (Score:4, Interesting)

          by CODiNE (27417) on Saturday November 11 2006, @03:14AM (#16803496) Homepage
          Actually I remember an article here a while back about nanotubes being used to desalinize water. Apparently the perfectly smooth tubes aid the flow of water and defy the usual "size of pipe is proportional to water pressure" equations. What you could actually do in a 3D chip is leave extra nanotubes built in that simply flow in straight lines through the gaps in the chip where no conductive tubes are located, then pumping fluids through it wouldn't cause problems at all.

          The excellent heat-transfer of nanotubes, plus the efficient water flow through them would make cooling them much better than current chips.
      • one of the ways around this problem is through building in heat pipes into the silicon. 3-D chips will have metal vias between the chip layers for the transfer of data, but additionally they will include metal vias at strategic points to handle heat transfer. Additionally it is unlikely 3-D chips will get beyond a couple of layers anytime soon, the problem is just that it's so expensive to produce mask sets for those chips. Assuming each chip layer has the same number of metal layers, having a mask set

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by rogtioko (1024857)
      Another problem with stacked processors, besides heat, is that to really take advantage of the proximity the interface would have to be changed to one that integrates individual units of each processor more directly. This is far from conventional in terms of normal multicore-chip manufacture and would suffer from non-mainstream extra costs. Still, it should be designed and manufactured: the costs would go down when demand follows.
      I've read that, like 3d microprocessors, m

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Iron Condor (964856)

      number of cores per die ramping up at incredible rates,

      Yeah, we're already up to ... uh ... four...

    • Don't forget the blinking lights.

      Light still is faster than electrons.

      Call me when I get Orac for my Desktop.

  • What??? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Rellik66 (596729) on Saturday November 11 2006, @12:46AM (#16802958)
    No Nanotrucks?
  • I fail to see what the fuss is about. A quick search of Web of Knowledge (for those of you with access to online periodicals) gives several abstracts where connections were formed with carbon nanotubes and the electronic properties were studied. To throw around buzzwords, how do you think researchers already knew about this "ballistic conductivity" before Intel made these interconnects? Unless the Intel results indicate how to fabricate these interconnects in bulk, there's absolutely nothing worth talkin
  • I'll get mod'd down for this, but I don't care, it has to be said.

    Is it just me or are these tubes jokes just getting old and stale? They were funny for the first few months, but now they're just predictable.

    Stop mod'ing them as funny, they aren't anymore. There's very little humor value in a 3 month old joke, that gets told -invariably- everyday, on at least one story. Ted Stevens is a tool. His explanation was stupid, but it wasn't that funny...at least not this long after he'd made it.
    • There's very little humor value in a 3 month old joke, that gets told -invariably- everyday, on at least one story.

      You must be new here!

      (Notice: The joke itself illustrates the funnyness of old jokes; the funniness being completely invalidated by this note. Great Success!)

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bersl2 (689221)
      Would you consider it hypocrisy that your own sig is a minor modification on an old and stale joke? Or is there something special about the average person's ignorance displayed in the "10 kinds of people" joke over the politician's ignorance in the "tubes" gag that I don't know about?

      Then again, it is in your sig, and anything goes in sigs.
    • "Ted Stevens is a tool."

      Tool...or prescient genius? You won't be calling him a tool when the internets really are comprised of tubes, sir!

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Jeremi (14640)
      Is it just me or are these tubes jokes just getting old and stale?


      Yes, they are, but the important thing is that they are doing their job: crowding out the last of the "overlords" jokes. (and I, for one, look forward to a glorious overlords-free Slashdot)

  • Ted Stevens, redux (Score:2, Redundant)

    by d_jedi (773213)
    A processor is not something you just dump something on. It's not a big truck. It's a series of (nano)tubes! And if you don't understand that these tubes can be filled and if they are filled, when you put your program in, it gets in line and it's going to be delayed by any process that puts into that tube enormous amounts of instructions, enormous amounts of instructions.
  • Can we go back to spaghetti code? The Noodly One will be pleased!
  • Now if we can only mass produce a 21st century way to generate the steam.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      People will conduct electricity (otherwise the electric chair wouldn't work), does that mean that people are made out of metal?

    • Re:Don't let random people write science articles (Score:5, Informative)

      by wass (72082) on Saturday November 11 2006, @01:33AM (#16803136)
      What a stupid comment. If a carbon nanotube conducts electricity then it is by definition a metal.


      Are you serious, or are you just trolling? As a blatant counterexample, there are non-metallic superconductors, which conduct electricity infinitely better than a metal. So sure, metals conduct (with non-zero resistance) and have some common characteristics, eg their fermi energy typically lies in the middle of a band (unlike semiconductors or insulators), ratio of thermal to electrical conductivity is relatively constant, etc.


      But there are many things that also conduct fairly well at room temperature, such as doped silicon (an insulator). However, cool down silicon and the resistance increases (not enough thermal energy to excite electrons above the bandgap). Cool down a metal and its resistance will decrease (to a limiting factor). Cool down a superconductor and it undergoes a phase transition to a state of infinite conductivity.


      Carbon nanotubes are actually extremely interesting in this regards, they can look metallic or insulating, depending on the chirality (ie, how the graphene plane is rolled into a tube). The metallic ones (with the fermi energy in the middle of a band) have quite long mean-free paths. Hence electrons can travel through the tube without scattering (this is the ballistic travel mentioned in the slashdot blurb). This limits the nanotubes resistance to the quantum resistance of about 25 kOhm. (Actually, the tube's resistance is 1/4 this resistance, as there are four quantum conducting channels because the graphene plane has two independent sites in its unit cell, and each site can have two values of electron spin).


      Even some the insulating (or semiconducting) carbon nanotubes (or the graphene plane itself) are really cool. Due to the layout of the graphene plane, the band structure isn't pseudo-parabolic (as in a standard insulator) but conical (two cones meeting at a point), like a Minkowski light cone, or MCP from TRON. In the right orientations, the Fermi energy lies exactly at the intersection, and believe it or not, the excited states look EXACTLY like relativistic massive particles. The speed of light is mapped to the speed of sound instead, in this system. Really cool stuff, there are tons of future applications for nanotubes and graphene studies due to the interesting band structure, we've only really begun to break the surface.

      • But there are many things that also conduct fairly well at room temperature, such as doped silicon (an insulator).

        Or how about a person?
      • Just a bit of a nitpick: resistance is the measure of how much a certain object/length of wire resists current. For a type of material of unknown physical characteristics resistivity (Ohms*meters) is the proper unit. Otherwise, very informative and interesting post.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by wass (72082)
          For a type of material of unknown physical characteristics resistivity (Ohms*meters) is the proper unit.


          Wrong, not in the quantum ballistic limit, where each quantum conducting channel contributes one unit of quantum conductance, (2e^2/h), where conductance is inverse of resistance. It makes no sense to talk about resistance per unit length when the electron travels ballistically through the device!

          • Hmm, interesting. Learn something new everyday.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by wass (72082)
              'Resistivity' is really only valid on a macroscopic scale, where electron transfer is dominated by diffusive motion. Ie, one can derive Ohm's Law quite easily in the simplest example for a metal with scattering, the Drude Model [wikipedia.org].

              In that link, when they get to the point J=sigma E, that is Ohm's Law, albeit in a form you might not be familiar with, where J is the current density, E is electric field, and sigma is conductivity, or the inverse of resistivity. Assuming no gradients in current or field, you can

      • I remember single wall nanotubes are either metallic or semiconductive. It is pretty interesting to know how could they only grow metallic nanotubes or remove semiconductive nanotubes. Or actually they don't, and the electrons select metallic tubes automatically, but I highly doubt this approach because the electrons via metallic nannotubes and electrons via semiconductive nanotubes will arrive at different time. I am waiting for my friend who attend the meeting tell me the whole story.
      • Random people writing science articles is almost as annoying as politicians deciding whether global warming is real, stem cell research is kosher, or evolution is impossible because the numbers are too big. -I agree, leave it to the professionals.
    • Wrong! There are plastics that can conduct electricity, water conducts electricity, and in some rare instances certain mixures of concrete can conduct electricity.
      • Hmmm. Now, I'm not so good at the Chemistry, but I seem to remember water being a non-conductive material. It needed electrolytes or something like that to conduct electricity, didn't it?

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by maraist (68387) *
          Resistivity is the inverse of conductivity..
          Conductivity is a function of:
          A) Number of possible free electron states (positions) - function of temperature
          B) Mean time to collision for given electron - function of temperature
          C) [free] Electron density - function of temperature

          Note that higher temperatures mean:
          B) greater vibrational or translational properties of the material which obstruct the paths of free electrons.. So B is inversely proportional to temperature.
          C) greater number of electrons are excited
      • plastics conduct by big PI bond [wikipedia.org], water conducts by ions moving in water, ceramics conduct by motion of charged defects and ions.
    • First, how much would a chip really use? Likely less than a tenth of a gram, but that is a SWAG. Certianly less than a gram unless the process is wasteful.

      Second, it is likely initially for supercomputing or network superswitches, where price is less of an issue.

      Third, if they up the demand, more will be made and the price should come down.

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