IBM breakthrough anticipates changes to chip industry Yet
another challenge for Intel Intel may be under pressure from ARM
chips in the short term, but the chip maker is facing some
longer term challenges as the end of Moore’s Law approaches. On
Sunday, IBM announced a chip production breakthrough that
forgoes any reliance on silicon semiconductors, allowing the
fabrication of chips using carbon nanotube technology. A team of
scientists working for the company claim to have developed a
production process to cram over ten thousand transistors onto a
chip using carbon nanotubes, offering a potential alternative to
silicon devices, and opening up the possibility of developing
smaller and more powerful computers into the future. The chip
industry has so far relied on design engineers’ ability to
consistently create smaller and faster processors, but as
development begins to reach atomic scale any speed or size
improvements using silicon based transistors will become more
difficult due to the laws of physics. This