The most powerful university-based supercomputer in the world is making comparisons between carbon nanotubes and copper nanowires to bring academia and the semiconductor industry closer to alleviating the ‘bottleneck’ of information that limits the development of the next generation of smaller computer chips.
Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, New York, crunched numbers for months on the advanced quantum-mechanical computer to run extensive simulations to study copper nanowire and carbon nanotubes using quantum mechanics rather than empirical laws.
Carbon nanotubes
Results showed that the carbon nanotube bundles had a much smaller electrical resistance than the copper nanowires. A lower resistance suggests that the carbon nanotube bundles would be better suited for interconnect applications. Interconnects are the tiny copper wires that transport electricity and information around the chip and to other chips, which have also shrunk along with microchips.
Saroj Nayak, an associate professor in Rensselaer’s Department of Department of Physics explained: “Because of the nanoscale size of interconnects, they are subject to quantum phenomena that are not apparent and not visible at the macroscale.”
Carbon nanotube bundles are a popular possible successor to copper, Nayak said, because of the material’s excellent conductivity and mechanical integrity. It is generally accepted that a quality replacement for copper must be discovered and perfected in the next five to 10 years in order to further perpetuate Moore’s Law – an industry mantra that states the number of transistors on a computer chip, and thus the chip’s speed, should double every 18-24 months.
The research results will be featured in the March issue of Journal of Physics: Condensed Matter.
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Date Published: March 14, 2008
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