At least 50 years ago, our core is made up of our mobile phones, our mobile phones, our mobile phones, our mobile phones, our mobile phones, and even all of our past 50 years. But scientists and researchers now believe that silicon crystal processors are nearing their limits. IBM scientists seem to have found a real way to get rid of silicon crystals and turn to carbon nanotubes.
Carbon is a versatile element in nature in the form of coal, pencil lead and diamond. One of its manifestations is graphene. You can think of graphene as something like a wire mesh of molecules: individual carbon atoms are joined together in a hexagonal lattice to form a thin layer only one atom thick. A carbon nanotube is a piece of graphene sheet rolled up to form a cylinder. Carbon nanotubes are 100 million times longer than their width. That's still tiny for us, but carbon nanotubes can be much larger than any other known cylindrical nanostructure. It's a very useful feature if you want to design small things like processor chips.
For example, silicon and carbon nanotubes are also semiconductors, and in some cases theoretically, the conductivity is 100 times that of copper. This makes them one of the few materials that can replace silicon in chip design. Chip designers looking to use carbon nanotubes to make processors face a major problem: how to deal with them and place them in the various models needed for processors. The current way to etch the wafers and the transistor is to etch the silicon into the substrate and then etch the circuit using laser beams. Crystal triode is the absolute core of digital processor, which is not only responsible for storage, but also responsible for the code running in the device. Conventional etching techniques don't use nanotubes for transistors, but IBM researchers have come up with a new technology that allows carbon nanotubes to be nimbly aligned to the path etched on a chip.
How tightly do these nanotubes bind? According to IBM materials scientist James hannault, there are about one billion nanotubes per square centimeter. Processors built with carbon nanotubes can keep digital technology going. Since the first integrated circuit was developed in 1958, the number of transistor manufacturers has doubled about every two years. Silicon has not come to the end of the road, and chipmakers have begun to prepare for the development of new or second-generation silicon chips. Chips are becoming so small that they can be measured using a single atom. This sets a high threshold for making such chips, which require manufacturers to perform billions of atomic precision operations per processor.
In theory, carbon nanotubes can make processors that are smaller than current transistor technology. Like today's processors, smaller size means less energy consumption. For mobile devices, that means less heat and longer battery life. In addition, the electrical properties of carbon nanotubes also mean that they can switch on and off faster than silicon transistors, which means they can run faster than today's chips. So nanotube processors will be smaller, faster, and, because they are made of carbon, they may be more environmentally friendly. In fact, this is not the case. Although carbon nanotubes do cause less harm to the environment than the materials in many high-tech products, the process of manufacturing carbon nanotube processors is unlikely to be more environmentally friendly than silicon chips, let alone be biodegradable. Again, the chips are still hard to make and expensive. Just like today's newest and fastest chips can only be used for the most gorgeous high-end devices. Carbon nanotube processors may be the future of computers, but they will be on the shelves of retailers for a long time.