IBM announces breakthrough in supercomputing

Scientists at IBM have found a way to make supercomputers compute even faster. On October 2 the company announced a “major engineering breakthrough” in carbon nanotube electronics. They say it paves the way for a “post-silicon future.”

Carbon nanotubes are being developed as an alternative to traditional silicon and show great promise for “dramatically faster, smaller and more powerful computer chips.” However there have been hurdles related to their “contact resistance.”

Now, phys.org reports, the IBM researchers have found a way to shrink their transistor contacts without reducing performance.

Carbon nanotubes can operate as transistor switches at channel dimensions of less than 10 nanometres (10,000 times thinner than a strand of human hair). This size is less than half the size of leading silicon technology.

IBM says the carbon nanotube chips “could greatly improve the capabilities of high performance computers, enabling Big Data to be analyzed faster, increasing the power and battery life of mobile devices and the Internet of Things, and allowing cloud data centers to deliver services more efficiently and economically.”

To read the article at phys.org, click here.