New nano-wires may help replace silicon in computer chips

grahamearnshaw

15 years ago

This is important even if you only understand computers vaguely, as in a mirror.

According to a collaborative team of Chinese and Danish researchers, organic nano-scale wires may serve as an alternative to silicon in computer chips.

So how big is a nano-scale wire? So small it is difficult to describe. We can try with the illustration. A nanometer is to one inch as one inch is to 400 miles. Another way to visualize the size: the diameter of a small coin compared to the driving distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco. One nanometer equals a billionth of a meter.

Technically, Wikipedia tells us a nanometre (American spelling: nanometer; symbol nm) is equal to one billionth of a meter. It is one of the more often used units for very small lengths.

Another way of getting a handle on this size is to think of the almost invisible grooves on a CD-Rom. The data is stored as indentations (known as pits) that are approximately 100 nanometers deep. So one nanometer is is a hundredth of the depth of the groove on a CD-ROM disk. Or, if you prefer, very small.

Nanochemists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the Nano-Science Center, Department of Chemistry at the University of Copenhagen, say that they have created nanoscale electric contacts out of organic and inorganic nanowires.

They say that doing so has enabled them to produce prototype computer electronics on the nanoscale.

If it works as promised, this will change the electronic world as the transistor did when it replaced the valve. A transistor is in principal an on- and off- contact, and there are millions of tiny transistors on every computer chip. Get down to the nanometer scale and think of thousands of billions instead.

The researchers have revealed that the material developed by them has a low operational current, high mobility and good stability, the qualities that can enable it to compete with silicon.

Excited over the results, Professor Wenping Hu, of Chinese Academy of Sciences, said: "This work is the first significant result of our collaboration with the researchers from the Nano-Science Center. It is a good starting point for our new Danish-Chinese research centre for molecular nano-electronics and it underlines the fact that we can complement each other and that together we can achieve exciting and important results."

Little About connects to a research article describing the study which has been published in the journal Advanced Materials. You may not understand it, but it amazingly important. It means infinitely smaller and substantially more reliable computing devices.