Max Shulaker,an electrical engineering graduate student at Stanford University,is making prototypes of a new kind of semiconductor circuit that may one day be installed in the world's fastest supercomputers.Though the custom manufacturing process is demanding, if successful it could help increase computers' processing speed significantly.
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In their pursuit of designing smaller, faster and cheaper circuit boards, electrical engineers are developing what could become the basis for the world's smallest and lowest-powered consumer gadgets. Earlier this year, Intel unveiled a 3-D transistor showing off what it called the most radical shift in semiconductor technology in more than 50 years. The world's largest chip maker said its technology could bring more computing power to gadgets as well as speed up corporate data centres.
Shulaker is a member of the Robust Systems Group at Stanford. He, along with other student researchers, is making a new switch called a carbon nanotube field effect transistor, or C.N.F.E.T. To make prototype switches, Shulaker first chemically grows billions of carbon nanotubes on a quartz surface, mentions the report by The New York Times. After coating nanotubes with an ultrafine layer of gold, Shulaker uses a piece of tape to pick them up by hand and transfer them gently to a silicon wafer.
"If the new technology proves workable, it will avert a crisis that threatens to halt more than five decades of progress by chip makers, who now routinely etch circuits smaller than a wavelength of light to make ever more powerful computers," The New York Times reports.
In their pursuit of designing smaller, faster and cheaper circuit boards, electrical engineers are developing what could become the basis for the world's smallest and lowest-powered consumer gadgets. Earlier this year, Intel unveiled a 3-D transistor showing off what it called the most radical shift in semiconductor technology in more than 50 years. The world's largest chip maker said its technology could bring more computing power to gadgets as well as speed up corporate data centres.
Shulaker is a member of the Robust Systems Group at Stanford. He, along with other student researchers, is making a new switch called a carbon nanotube field effect transistor, or C.N.F.E.T. To make prototype switches, Shulaker first chemically grows billions of carbon nanotubes on a quartz surface, mentions the report by The New York Times. After coating nanotubes with an ultrafine layer of gold, Shulaker uses a piece of tape to pick them up by hand and transfer them gently to a silicon wafer.
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