 Researchers at IBM have teamed with
university researchers to build a ring oscillator circuit using a single carbon
nanotube rather than integrating multiple nanotubes for the first time. The
fully operating circuit was actually built using standard semiconductor
processes and used a single molecule as the base for all components in the
circuit, according to the company.
Carbon nanotube transistors have the
potential to outperform state-of-the-art silicon devices," said Dr. T.C. Chen,
vice president, Science & Technology, IBM Research. "However,
scientists have focused so far on fabricating and optimizing individual carbon
nanotube transistors. Now, we can evaluate the potential of carbon nanotube
electronics in complete circuits -- a critical step toward the integration of
the technology with existing chip-making techniques."
The IBM team acknowledged that the carbon
nanotube performance was still slower than standard CMOS transistors though the
team believes the new single nanotube circuit will allow them better understand
the workings of nanotubes and develop increasingly sophisticated devices that
could potentially replace standard structures.
"Integrated Logic Circuit Assembled on a
Single Carbon Nanotube", by Zhihong Chen, Joerg Appenzeller, Yu-Ming Lin,
Paul Solomon, and Phaedon Avouris of IBM's T. J. Watson Research
Center, Yorktown Heights, NY; Jennifer Sippel-Oakley and Andrew G. Rinzler of
the Department of Physics, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL; and Jinyao
Tang and Shalom J. Wind of the Department of Chemistry and the Department of
Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics, Columbia University, New York, NY is
published in the March 24th issue of the journal Science.
|
News 
