![]() To be robust to those failures, advanced circuits will need carbon nanotubes at around 99.999999 percent purity, which is virtually impossible to produce today. But unavoidably, a small portion of carbon nanotubes will be metallic, and will slow or stop the transistor from switching. Ideally, CNFETs need semiconducting properties to switch their conductivity on and off, corresponding to the bits 1 and 0. Hills did the bulk of the microprocessor design, while Lau handled most of the manufacturing.įor years, the defects intrinsic to carbon nanotubes have been a “bane of the field,” Shulaker says. Since then, Shulaker and his MIT colleagues have tackled three specific challenges in producing the devices: material defects, manufacturing defects, and functional issues. ![]() The microprocessor builds on a previous iteration designed by Shulaker and other researchers six years ago that had only 178 CNFETs and ran on a single bit of data. Bishop, Tathagata Srimani, Pritpal Kanhaiya, Rebecca Ho, and Aya Amer, all of EECS Arvind, the Johnson Professor of Computer Science and Engineering and a researcher in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory Anantha Chandrakasan, the dean of the School of Engineering and the Vannevar Bush Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Samuel Fuller, Yosi Stein, and Denis Murphy, all of Analog Devices. Joining Shulaker on the paper are: first author and postdoc Gage Hills, graduate students Christian Lau, Andrew Wright, Mindy D. completely re-invents how we build chips with carbon nanotubes.” If we want to continue to have gains in computing, carbon nanotubes represent one of the most promising ways to overcome those limits. Shulaker, the Emanuel E Landsman Career Development Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) and a member of the Microsystems Technology Laboratories. ![]() “This is by far the most advanced chip made from any emerging nanotechnology that is promising for high-performance and energy-efficient computing,” says co-author Max M. It also executed a modified version of the classic “Hello, World!” program, printing out, “Hello, World! I am RV16XNano, made from CNTs.” The researchers’ microprocessor was able to execute the full set of instructions accurately. The microprocessor is based on the RISC-V open-source chip architecture that has a set of instructions that a microprocessor can execute. The Nature paper describes the microprocessor design and includes more than 70 pages detailing the manufacturing methodology. They demonstrated a 16-bit microprocessor with more than 14,000 CNFETs that performs the same tasks as commercial microprocessors. The MIT researchers have invented new techniques to dramatically limit defects and enable full functional control in fabricating CNFETs, using processes in traditional silicon chip foundries. But when fabricated at scale, the transistors often come with many defects that affect performance, so they remain impractical. Research indicates CNFETs have properties that promise around 10 times the energy efficiency and far greater speeds compared to silicon. Making carbon nanotube field-effect transistors (CNFET) has become a major goal for building next-generation computers. ![]() But experts now foresee a time when silicon transistors will stop shrinking, and become increasingly inefficient. As predicted by Moore’s Law, industry has been able to shrink down and cram more transistors onto chips every couple of years to help carry out increasingly complex computations. Silicon transistors - critical microprocessor components that switch between 1 and 0 bits to carry out computations - have carried the computer industry for decades. The microprocessor, described today in the journal Nature, can be built using traditional silicon-chip fabrication processes, representing a major step toward making carbon nanotube microprocessors more practical. After years of tackling numerous design and manufacturing challenges, MIT researchers have built a modern microprocessor from carbon nanotube transistors, which are widely seen as a faster, greener alternative to their traditional silicon counterparts.
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