Superstrong Computer Chips Made with Carbon Nanotubes

For the past decade, carbon nanotubes, though a relatively recent find, were considered to be the best candidate for replacing silicon in the competition for miniaturization of the computer industry, who by now has almost reached the limit of its applications.

Intel, the giant of microprocessors, wants to use these nanotubes to extend the life of its chips. The company presented a new patented technology that uses the nanotubes' strength and heat-dissipating properties to reinforce the conducting copper tracks that connect millions of transistors together.

Chi-Won Hwang is the inventor of the technology to be used by Intel, and he says that depositing heat-sink nanotubes on electrically insulating layers adjacent to the copper tracks slashes the thermal stress caused by fast-pulsing electric currents.

It is precisely this stress that produces fractures in the tracks on the chips, thus rendering them useless. Also, the superstrong carbon nanotubes can be used to boost a chip's resistance to impact shock, according to Hwang.

Arranging nanotubes into arrays that can be transformed to plastic and other unusual substrates for applications such as flexible displays, structural health monitors and heads-up displays can enhance the performance of the devices built with conventional silicon-based technology.

The thin-film semiconductor material that results from the carbon naotube arrays allows charge to move independently through each of the nanotubes, and so, this configuration can be integrated by conventional chip-making technologies.

However, it is highly unlikely for us to see silicon being completely replaced by nanotube arrays anytime soon, but adding them to a silicon chip for higher speed operation, power capacity and linear behavior will produce enhanced functionality.

The new technology are a major step in understanding the processes of nanotubes manufacturing, and thus a wider application area, since single and multi-walled nanotubes can produce materials with toughness unmatched in the man-made and natural world.