nanotubes Archives
Integrated circuits, such as the silicon chips inside all modern electronics, are only as good as their wiring, but copper conduits are approaching physical performance limitations as they get thinner. Chipmakers have hoped that carbon "nanotubes" would allow them to continue using thinner wiring as they pack more devices into chips, but no one had demonstrated nanotube wires working on a conventional silicon chip. In a paper published online today by the journal Nano Letters, electrical engineers at Stanford University and Toshiba report using nanotubes to wire a silicon chip operating at speeds comparable to those of commercially available processors and memory.
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 | One of the immediate applications of carbon nanotubes (CNT) is as an additive to polymers to create electrically conducting plastics-a relatively low CNT concentration can dramatically change the polymer's electrical conductivity by orders of magnitude, from an insulator to a conductor. New measurements by scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have uncovered an intriguing wrinkle. For a given CNT concentration, the electrical properties of the composite can be tuned from being a conductor to a non-conductor simply by changing processing conditions-basically how fast the polymer flows. ...> Full Article |
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