New Direction of CPU: Carbon Crystal Replaces Silicon Crystals

IBM announced that its scientists have used mainstream manufacturing technology for the first time to accurately place more than 10,000 carbon nanometer integrated circuit devices on a single chip. These carbon crystal circuits are only nanometers in size, making the commercialization of the technology even more significant. We hope that in the future we will be able to replace today's commonly used silicon wafer technology, which will make future chips smaller and more efficient, and further reduce the size of existing computers and smart devices.

Silicon chip technology has led technology industry technology innovation for more than 40 years. It is still using Moore's Law to continuously narrow its appearance and improve chip performance. However, in recent years, as the transistor reaches the nanometer level, Moore's Law is also closer to the physical limit of the crystal reduction. IBM pointed out that it is expected that after a few generations of products, the existing silicon crystal technology will reduce the benefits to the limit.

Carbon Nano-Integrated Circuits (ICs) are new semiconductor materials whose electronic properties are more attractive than silicon, especially if they can create nano-scale integrated circuits that are only a few tens of nanometers in width. The electrons move more easily in the carbon crystal than in the silicon crystal, and therefore have a faster transmission rate. This is also the reason why carbon is used to replace existing silicon integrated circuits.

Prior to this, scientists were able to place hundreds of carbon nanometer circuits on a single chip at a time, which is still quite far from commercial applications because there are currently more than one billion circuits in a commercial chip. IBM Labs The second time opens up a new possibility in circuit manufacturing. In addition to carbon nanochips, IBM has also developed a DNA chip, and has successfully combined the DNA's self-assembly properties with the chip's etching method. However, these technologies are still in the scientific research stage, and there are still very long distances from commercialization.