Source: IBM
$3B Chip R&D Investment Continues to Deliver Innovations
To Help Meet Advanced Computing Needs of the Cognitive Era
(October 1, 2015) IBM
Research (NYSE: IBM) today announced a major engineering breakthrough that
could accelerate carbon nanotubes replacing silicon transistors to power future
computing technologies.
IBM scientists demonstrated a new way to shrink transistor
contacts without reducing performance of carbon nanotube devices, opening a
pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful computer chips beyond
the capabilities of traditional semiconductors. The results will be reported in
the October 2 issue of Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.aac8006).
IBM's breakthrough overcomes a major hurdle that silicon and
any semiconductor transistor technologies face when scaling down. In any
transistor, two things scale: the channel and its two contacts. As devices
become smaller, increased contact resistance for carbon nanotubes has hindered
performance gains until now. These results could overcome contact resistance
challenges all the way to the 1.8 nanometer node – four technology generations
away.
Carbon nanotube chips could greatly improve the capabilities
of high performance computers, enabling Big Data to be analyzed faster,
increasing the power and battery life of mobile devices and the Internet of
Things, and allowing cloud data centers to deliver services more efficiently
and economically.
Schematics showing
the conversion from a side-bonded contact (left), where the SWNT
is partially
covered by Mo, to end-bonded contact (right), where the SWNT is attached
to the bulk Mo
electrode through carbide bonds while the carbon atoms from originally
covered portion of
the SWNT uniformly diffuse out into the Mo electrode. Source: IBM
Silicon transistors, tiny switches that carry information on
a chip, have been made smaller year after year, but they are approaching a
point of physical limitation. With Moore's Law running out of steam, shrinking
the size of the transistor – including the channels and contacts – without
compromising performance has been a vexing challenge troubling researchers for
decades.
IBM has previously shown that carbon nanotube transistors
can operate as excellent switches at channel dimensions of less than ten
nanometers – the equivalent to 10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair
and less than half the size of today’s leading silicon technology. IBM's new
contact approach overcomes the other major hurdle in incorporating carbon
nanotubes into semiconductor devices, which could result in smaller chips with
greater performance and lower power consumption.
Earlier this summer, IBM unveiled the first 7 nanometer node
silicon test chip, pushing the limits of silicon technologies and ensuring
further innovations for IBM Systems and the IT industry. By advancing research
of carbon nanotubes to replace traditional silicon devices, IBM is paving the
way for a post-silicon future and delivering on its $3 billion chip R&D
investment announced in July 2014.
“These chip innovations are necessary to meet the emerging
demands of cloud computing, Internet of Things and Big Data systems,” said
Dario Gil, vice president of Science & Technology at IBM Research. “As
silicon technology nears its physical limits, new materials, devices and
circuit architectures must be ready to deliver the advanced technologies that
will be required by the Cognitive Computing era. This breakthrough shows that
computer chips made of carbon nanotubes will be able to power systems of the
future sooner than the industry expected.”