Joined: 16 Mar 2004 |Posted: Mon Feb 04, 2008 11:09 am Post
subject: Carbon nanotubes to the rescue of Moore's law Over the
next few years, semiconductor fabrication will move from the
current state-of-the-art generation of 90 nanometer processes to
the next 65 nm and 45 nm generations. Intel is even already
working on 32 nm processor technology, code-named "Westmere",
that is expected to hit the market sometime around 2009. The
result of these efforts will be billion-transistor processors
where a billion or more transistor-based circuits are integrated
into a single chip. One of the increasingly difficult problems
that chip designers are facing is that the high density of
components packed on a chip makes interconnections increasingly
difficult. In order to be able to continue the trend predicted
by Moore’s law, at least for a few more years, researchers are
now turning to alternative materials for transistors and
interconnect and one of the prime candidates for this job are
single-walled carbon nanotubes (S