4 ms·
Engineers build advanced microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes
- hkmurakami 7y agoAs with anything nanotubes, scalability and yield are the bottleneck and have been for the last ~20 years. Not sure we've made much progress in the 10 years since I was a great student in the field?
- ridruejo 7y agoThe article points out different ways yield is increased to get to a practical level
- bumblebritches5 7y agoIt's less advanced than the intel 8080 from 50 years ago...
- crakenzak 7y agoThe great thing about research and development like this is by designing practical use cases for carbon nanotubes, its far more likely for large companies (eg TSMC, Samsung, Intel) to pick up and invest large amounts of R&D money to improve yield/production of carbon nanotubes, benefiting everyone involved. Reminds me of how large phone/computer makers like Apple, Samsung and Huawei help foot the cost of R&D for so many innovations in the tech field (expensive die shrinks, display technology) which ends up trickling to nearly every industry.
- incompatible 7y agoAlready discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20823339 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20823339
- Ice_cream_suit 7y agoJust remember carbon nanotubes are highly carcinogenic.
- ganzuul 7y agoIs breaking open processors and inhaling the dust a common occurrence where you live?
- Ice_cream_suit 7y agoAlthough that sounds like fun (for certain values of fun), the issue would exposure during fabrication and possibly during destruction of nano tube containing equipment.
- the8472 7y agoWe have to rely on them handling hazardous substances properly anyway since semiconductor manufacturing already involves many of them. They use ClF₃ and sulfuric acid as cleaning agents, phosphine for doping, silane for CVD, etc.
- naasking 7y agoIndustrial scale manufacturing of just about anything probably involves quite a few carcinogens.
- Symmetry 7y agoI'm afraid that there are already a great number of unfriendly chemicals involved in the manufacture of regular old silicon ICs.
- true_tuna 7y agoI’ve worked in data centers. The constant air circulation causes dust to accumulate in visible places. I assure you, computers are not as sealed up and tidy as you’d think. We used to jokingly call the hard, thick, black dust “cancer”. It’s hard to know what’s in it without study, but when you manufacture something with dangerous materials some amount of that material makes it onto and into the finished product. I’m not advocating for alarm, but your po-pi-ing comment was designed to minimize and it demands counterpoint.
- 7y ago