Computer runs on carbon nanotubes

Abstract

Researchers have made the first carbon nanotube computer capable of running simple programs (Nature 2019, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-019-1493-8). The microprocessor integrates more than 14,000 carbon nanotube transistors built with processes used by the electronics industry. “It is a critical first step to move nanotube transistors from research labs into manufacturing plants,” says Qing Cao, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who was not involved in the work. Silicon transistors have enabled today’s digital world, but they are now reaching their limits in terms of how small chipmakers can fabricate them. Some researchers believe carbon nanotubes could take electronics onward past silicon. In the past 2 decades, carbon nanotube electronics have progressed from a single transistor to a simple 178-transistor computer reported by a Stanford University team in 2013. Yet a microprocessor that can execute the complex computations necessary to run modern programs requires tens of thousands of