Researchers get nanotube chips running at commercial speeds
Posted Jan 31st 2008 5:43AM by Nilay Patel
Filed under: Misc. Gadgets
Carbon nanotubes have a ton of promise, and we’ve seen a lot of prospective applications for the tech, but researchers at Stanford, working with Toshiba, have managed to demonstrate the first use of nanotubes in chips that run at commercially-viable speeds. The chip features 256 ring oscillators and packs over 11,000 transistors in just one hundredth of a square inch. When wired with the nanotubes and powered up, the chip ran at speeds between 800MHz and 1.06GHz — not desktop speeds, to be sure, but still promising. The team says that while the experiment bodes well for the future, we shouldn’t expect any direct applications yet — but you know we’re dreaming of tiny implantable supercomputers anyway.
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