IBM’s super fast, powerful and tiny carbon computer chips could soon be in all our devices

Moore’s Law be damned. IBM announced today (Oct. 1) that it had overcome one of the major hurdles preventing carbon nanotubes from being used as transistors for computer chips. It could mean the end of the silicon computer chip.

Carbon nanotubes are, as their name somewhat suggestions, thin rolled-up sheets of carbon, only one atom thick. These tiny tubes display all sorts of useful characteristics, such as being super strong, super insulating, and being great, reliable semiconductors.

That makes them a great material for computer chips, as they process the ability, like silicon, to switch between having electrical current flow through them or not.

They’re also considerably smaller than the smallest silicon transistors on the market. Intel’s current chips are 10 nanometers wide, roughly the length of a few strands of DNA, and the company is struggling to shrink its technology much smaller. IBM, however, announced in July that it had managed to build a silicon transistor just 7 nm wide, and was looking at how how to make one even smaller. But a single carbon nanotube is only about 1 nm wide, meaning if it were possible to wrangle enough of them together—millions or billions on a single chip—it’d be possible to have computer chips considerably faster than anything currently available.

The big hurdle that IBM has cleared is figuring out how to connect nanotubes together efficiently. In a paper published in the Oct. 2 edition of research journal Science, IBM’s research team outlined how to scale down the contact size—the piece of material that connects two semiconductors together—to the same scale that they have managed to produce carbon nanotubes

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