IBM next generation computing

In the 1960’s, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit would double every year for the foreseeable future- a decade later he revised this approximation to a doubling in capacity every two years and this has been pretty accurate ever since.  We have therefore benefited from an exponential increase in computer power and storage which is why today’s smartphones are now more powerful than a 1980’s mainframe.  However we are reaching the physical limits of manufacturing the ever denser technology.  Given that our information economy is predicated on the falling cost of computing power and storage, there would be a huge economic impact if this trend were to fade.

IBM have worked out how to atomically bond a molybdenum metal contact to a carbon nanotube to move electrons through the carbon nanotube without affecting chip performance.  The nanotubes are hollow cylinders whose walls are made of a single layer of carbon atoms in a hexagonal lattice and they share the “semiconductor” property that enables them to act as on-off switches.  Carbon nanotubes are 10,000 times smaller than a human hair.

There are still many manufacturing challenges but IBM’s research could pave the way to reduce the spacing of logic gates from 12nm to 3nm so we may be benefiting from nanotube computing power in the next decade.