IBM Research has developed a new way of creating contacts for carbon nanotube that it claims will open "a pathway to dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful computer chips beyond the capabilities of traditional semiconductors". The process involves rolling nanoscale tubes from sheets of graphene measuring just one atom thick and could give new life to Moore's Law.
The results, published in the journal Science, describe a new method for creating contacts for carbon nanotubes that -- unlike existing methods for both carbon and silicon transistors -- doesn't suffer from the problem of increased electrical resistance as the contact is reduced in size. Increased electrical resistance in a transistor results in performance reductions, meaning that, until now, smaller contacts would result in slower processors.
To overcome the problem, IBM developed an entirely new metallurgical process that chemically binds metal atoms to the carbon atoms at the end of the nanotubes. IBM said that this 'end-bonded contact scheme' allowed "the contacts to be shrunken down to below 10 nanometres without deteriorating performance of the carbon nanotube devices". This means we could see carbon nanotube processors "within the decade."
But the company isn't there yet. In a Q&A posted on the IBM Research blog, Nanoscale device and technology manager Shu-Jen Han explained what still needed to be done in order to use carbon nanotube transistors in a viable processor: "We've developed a way for carbon nanotubes to self-assemble and bind to specialised molecules on a wafer. The next step is to push the density of these placed nanotubes (to 10 nm apart) and reproducibility across an entire wafer."