Researchers at Stanford have made a basic computer using carbon nanotubes according to a press release from the university.
"People have been talking about a new era of carbon nanotube electronics moving beyond silicon," Mitra, an electrical engineer and computer scientist said in a statement. "But there have been few demonstrations of complete digital systems using this exciting technology. Here is the proof."
The new creation has the potential to start a new generation of electronic devices capable of running faster, while using less energy compared to those made from silicon chips the press release reported.
"Carbon nanotubes [CNTs] have long been considered as a potential successor to the silicon transistor," Jan Rabaey, a world expert on electronic circuits and systems at the University of California-Berkeley said in a statement. "There is no question that this will get the attention of researchers in the semiconductor community and entice them to explore how this technology can lead to smaller, more energy-efficient processors in the next decade."
According to the press release, the news will ignite the spark for Stanford experts to search for other alternatives to operate computers other than silicon chips since they might run into physical limitations. This could the experts from making devices that are smaller, faster and cheaper
"First, they put in place a process for fabricating CNT-based circuits," Giovanni De Micheli, director of the Institute of Electrical Engineering at Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne in Switzerland said in a statement. "Second, they built a simple but effective circuit that shows that computation is doable using CNTs."
Using an "imperfection immune design" researchers made a basic computer with 178 transistors. The machine was able to count and sort numbers. It has a basic operating system which can switch itself from these two tasks the press release reported.
