YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y.,
Oct. 1, 2015 /PRNewswire/ -- 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.
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."
A New Contact for Carbon Nanotubes
Carbon nanotubes represent a new class of semiconductor
materials that consist of single atomic sheets of carbon rolled up
into a tube. The carbon nanotubes form the core of a transistor
device whose superior electrical properties promise several
generations of technology scaling beyond the physical limits of
silicon.
Electrons in carbon transistors can move more easily than in
silicon-based devices, and the ultra-thin body of carbon nanotubes
provide additional advantages at the atomic scale. Inside a chip,
contacts are the valves that control the flow of electrons from
metal into the channels of a semiconductor. As transistors shrink
in size, electrical resistance increases within the contacts, which
impedes performance. Until now, decreasing the size of the contacts
on a device caused a commensurate drop in performance – a challenge
facing both silicon and carbon nanotube transistor
technologies.
IBM researchers had to forego traditional contact schemes and
invented a metallurgical process akin to microscopic welding that
chemically binds the metal atoms to the carbon atoms at the ends of
nanotubes. This 'end-bonded contact scheme' allows the contacts to
be shrunken down to below 10 nanometers without deteriorating
performance of the carbon nanotube devices.
"For any advanced transistor technology, the increase in contact
resistance due to the decrease in the size of transistors becomes a
major performance bottleneck," Gil added. "Our novel approach is to
make the contact from the end of the carbon nanotube, which we show
does not degrade device performance. This brings us a step closer
to the goal of a carbon nanotube technology within the decade."
About IBM Research
Now in its 70th year,
IBM Research continues to define the future of information
technology with more than 3,000 researchers in 12 labs located
across six continents. Scientists from IBM Research have produced
six Nobel Laureates, 10 U.S. National Medals of Technology, five
U.S. National Medals of Science, six Turing Awards, 19 inductees in
the National Academy of Sciences and 14 inductees into the U.S.
National Inventors Hall of Fame – the most of any company. For more
information, please visit www.research.ibm.com.
Contact
Christine
Vu
IBM Media Relations
vuch@us.ibm.com
914-945-2755
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SOURCE IBM Research