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May 24th, 2007

Designing tomorrow's computer - a race to the bottom

Abstract:
The semiconductor industry is on its way to 32 nm processor technology, expected to be commercialized around 2009, and the day might be near when transistors will reach the limits of miniaturization at atomic levels and put an end to the currently used fabrication technologies. Apart from the issues of interconnect density and heat dissipation, which some researchers hope to address with carbon nanotube-based applications, there is the fundamental issue of quantum mechanics that will kick in once chip design gets down to around 4 nm. This is where semiconductor dimensions have become so small that quantum effects would dominate the circuit behavior. Computer designers usually regard this as a bad thing because it might allow electrons to leak to places where they are not wanted. In particular, the tunneling of electrons and holes - so-called quantum tunneling - will become too great for the transistor to perform reliable operations. The result would be that the two states of the switch could become indistinguishable. Quantum effects can, however, also be beneficial. A group of researchers has now shown that a single bit of data might be stored on, and again retrieved from, a single atom. Just don't expect this in your computer anytime soon, though.

Source:
nanowerk.com

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