Nanowires Four Times Faster Than Silicon 114
evileyetmc writes "Advances in nanowires have shown that they may be the future in cheap, high-performance electronics. Researchers at Harvard have shown that nanowire transistors are are least four times faster than existing silicon ones. These nanowires show promise in being able to be embedded in plastics, and could lead to devices such as flexible displays that process information in the screen itself."
Wrong Conversion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:1, Offtopic)
So we can build a Beowulf clusters of breast implants!
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:5, Funny)
And people say that the owners of these devices are airheads. Nay! These are the future foremothers of the next great technological revolution -- GLDPs (Gonad Localized Distributed Processing). I for one applaud these persons of the technical cusp!
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:1)
Wouldn't you be pulling data from the hills and not the valley? Unless you're suggesting a cleavage antenna...
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:1)
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:2)
Re:Wrong Conversion (Score:1)
Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:5, Interesting)
Still, there is hope for implanted computers.
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:2, Funny)
Strippers aren't ditzy.
For thoose still with us, boobs with nano-screens showing more boobs ?
Come up with a way to slide credit cards for the picture-in-picture & you might be on to somthing.
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:2, Funny)
Exactly. They're the intelligent overclass hiding behind a thin veil of pasties.
- or -
I guess we know how your mom put the food on the table.
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:1)
I for one, welcome our new tig-o-bitty overlords.
and a nintendo, new cloths, skateboards, bicycles...
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:2)
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:1)
i don't only want to know where the card reader is, i want to thoroughly inspect it.
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:3, Informative)
If you mean computers implanted directly into my head... no thanks! Too creepy fo
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:3, Insightful)
As time goes by, supply and demand will dictate the price of this new technology.
Obviously true, but the supply curve is largely determined by production costs. So if production costs remain high, the price will not fall.
That said, the history of technology is encouraging in the sense that production costs often fall - a lot.
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:3, Interesting)
If the **AA, Oil Companies, or Microsoft are any indication, the price will not fall even if production costs do. I'm sure the first company to do this will have plenty of money and political palm greasing to be sure they are the only ones allowed to use it. For national security reasons of course, who knows what evil terrorists might do!
~Rebecca
Re:Not ready for prime-time yet (Score:2, Funny)
So I guess we will see nano production of these wires then?
What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:1)
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:2)
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:3, Informative)
-Rick
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:2)
-Rick
nanowire != carbon nanotubes (Score:3, Informative)
Re:nanowire != carbon nanotubes (Score:1)
Re:nanowire != carbon nanotubes (Score:2)
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:2)
Picking nits (Score:1)
Actually, it's silicon-germanium.
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:3, Informative)
Unless you require a single chip running at 500 GHz for some specific signal processing application - in which case the complexity of the chip would not be that tremendous and the manufacturing costs therefore much lower. Not all ICs are meant to be general-purpose computers, after all. (Not to mention that actual processing power doesn't grow in a linear fashion as you add cores, but
Re:What about IBM's new transistor? (Score:2)
Electronic Paper (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:3, Funny)
One question though- say you wanted to do a flipbook-style animation using nanowire-paper. Would you just need the one piece?
Is there a danger of accidentally opening up some 5th dimension by flipping through a book of nanowire-papers, each of which displayed an animated 3d image?
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:5, Interesting)
The media(e.g physical paper) may die, but the content will move on to the next sexy portable format that adequately fills all the niches that dumb paper (as opposed to smart paper) fills today. Despite what the average
Trust me on this...If newspapers could ditch the whole "Printing and Delivery" thing, they'd do it in a heartbeat. That stuff causes an amount of heartbreak you can only faintly imagine, working outside of the industry. Your data center goes down? Relocate it to your backup site an hour away...then print 100 metric tons of paper, and move it back in time to distribute it to people's lawns before 5am. It's an all-night job on a normal day. But with reliable portable e-delivery? They'd be done at midnight. They could lay off 75% of their staff, and concentrate on a better product.
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:2)
got to fix that
"They could lay off 75% of their staff, and" buy more yachts.
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:2)
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:1)
Sorry, I think you mean: They could lay off 75% of their staff, and pass the savings onto the executives.
Seriously though, the quality of newspapers would improve. Not because a newspaper could move funds to improve quality but because suddenly they would be competing with 20 other e-papers. Competition drives quality and price more then supply side factors.
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:2)
Newspaper: 50p
Electronic device: £250
Newspapers will be around for a long while yet. And that price isn't even including batteries, Internet connection, subscription to online services.
Or maybe, old devices are merely
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:1)
Good For Drivers? (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:1)
Re:Electronic Paper (Score:2)
basicly it was a user interface based on a folded sheet of paper
want to read a e-book? fold it so that you can flip it open and closed, by holding one side still and flipping the other, you would page back and forth in the book.
interesting concept, and with nanowire-based cpu and storage, no need for much bulk outside of the energy storage unit...
Nano-future (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Nano-future (Score:2)
Re:Nano-future (Score:2)
Re:Nano-future (Score:2)
Re:Nano-future (Score:1)
Re:Nano-future (Score:2)
Re:Nano-future (Score:3, Insightful)
Of course by that time the sillycone will be 4 times faster than these are.
Based on what? Has silicone gotten much faster in the past year?
Re:Nano-future (Score:1)
(1) Nanowires are not made the same way as conventional transistors. You have to understand that part carefully because it also illustrates why, despite more than 15 yrs old, there are no carbon nanotube electronics. You have to put them precisely where one wants. A random spaghetti on a wafer is not useful. Thus methods that employ CVD process produce nanowires in all directions. There are some ideas to make them directional, but none of them
Complicated lithography (Score:2, Insightful)
So does that mean they clock in at 2.0THz? (Score:2, Redundant)
and no, I most certainly did not RTFA; this is Slashdot/em.
More Info (Score:4, Informative)
http://uw.physics.wisc.edu/~himpsel/wires.html [wisc.edu]
i wonder how long before they can mesh nanowires directly to nerve cells... plug me in!
Re:CPU Futur (Score:1)
Ah, even more restrictive than HDMI (Score:5, Interesting)
Now the signal doesn't just get decrypted in the monitor, it doesn't even get decrypted and displayed until it reaches the display surface itself. Still doesn't close the analog hole, though...
Re:Ah, even more restrictive than HDMI (Score:2, Funny)
Wait til they can implant nanowire processors right into your eyeballs. Then they can decrypt the video when it reaches your retina. That'll close that nasty analog hole.
Re:Ah, even more restrictive than HDMI (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Ah, even more restrictive than HDMI (Score:2)
Re:Ah, even more restrictive than HDMI (Score:3, Funny)
I hear the MPAA is working on Sharp Stick(tm) technology for that.
Lighter, faster, thinner! (Score:2, Interesting)
Isn't here more to it than 4x speed increase? (Score:5, Interesting)
If the "hardware" is actually 4x faster than silicon, then that's a 4x increase for similarly scaled systems, right? The thing is that this technology can generate huge improvements in one of the primary focal points in chip design (aside from materials) over the last couple decades: smaller scale. There are several advantages to this: speed, heat, and power consumption, to name the top 3.
If you only have to send a signal 1/10th the distance to get it processed, that's a 10x increase in the throughput. If the processing also takes place in an area 1/10th the size, that's a full 10x increase in speed for the same construction material. (I pulled that 1/10th out of the air for ease of use, I realize nanowires could potentially construct circuits much smaller than this scale compared to current silicon architecture.)
Now, make that material 4x faster on top of the scaling improvements, and you have, not a 4x improvement, but a 40x improvement, right? Is there some glaring technical detail I'm missing?
Re:Isn't here more to it than 4x speed increase? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Isn't here more to it than 4x speed increase? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Isn't here more to it than 4x speed increase? (Score:2, Informative)
This will be expensive... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This will be expensive... (Score:1, Funny)
Sorting problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem, as I understand, is sorting.
Not all nanotubes are conductive, and they can't be manufactured selectiveley.
But otherwise they behave similarly.
It's like me giving you a pile of billions of wires and saying: "Here, some of these conduct, and others don't. Now start sorting."
Re:Sorting problem. (Score:5, Informative)
What I find intriguing is that the article mentions how conducive nanowire technology is to three dimensional circuit construction with a per-layer size of 100nm. That means I can build 1100 layers into a 0.11 mm thick sandwich. How about 100 Athlon 64 CPUs intermixed with 1000 1GB memory arrays? With how reliable they are claiming this technology is, that would represent a 100 core CPU, with 1 Terabyte of memory mixed in. Seems like this is clearly the future of the CPU market. Especially if the heat disappation is as good as they claim.
How do you like my new Athlon 64 X100 with 1TB of memory running at 16 GHz?
Re:Sorting problem. (Score:2)
How do you like my new Athlon 64 X100 with 1TB of memory running at 16 GHz?
...talking to the world on 1 hypertransport link with the same graphics card as everybody else. POP - headshot!
Re:Sorting problem. (Score:2)
Re:Sorting problem. (Score:2)
This is NANOWIRES, not nanotubes. (Score:2)
Re:Sorting problem. (Score:1)
Out just in time (Score:4, Funny)
Nano-stuff (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Nano-stuff (Score:1, Interesting)
Flexible/Rolled up! (Score:1)
Do we really want to roll up our processors like a newspaper?
Every other new future technology seems to include the phrase "and then you can roll it up just like paper!"
But there's a whole industry out there selling things to PREVENT paper from rolling up and being flexible!
We store paper so it doesn't roll up or bend, we print it in such a way to prevent rolling or curling and now I'm supposed to believe in the future we're magically going to WANT paper-thin electroni
Re:Flexible/Rolled up! (Score:2, Insightful)
On a more serious note, the reason for having flexibility is mostly for ease of use. You can't fold up many displays now--how would you like to put one in your back pocket, forget about it, then sit down--crunch!
With flexibility also comes easier storage. Have you ever tried storing something large and bulky? It's a pain, right? Say an old dresser. What would you give to be able to fo
Sure they're faster....they're shorter. (Score:3, Informative)
Sensational headline, but silicon still kicks ass. (Score:2, Insightful)
Nanotechnology is unlikely to make any significant impact in the next 10 years. We may make significant advanc
flexible displays that process information (Score:2)
I for one welcome our new flexible screen wielding, crime fighting, precognative overlords.
Re:Something strangely familiar... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Something strangely familiar... (Score:4, Interesting)
Regardless of what Apple's marketing team tries to imply that camera is clearly build into the shell with the lens peaking through an opening above the monitor.
I know Apple likes to make their technology sound like it's more advanced than it really is, but rest assured that the display itself doesn't have a camera built in.
Re:Something strangely familiar... (Score:2)
Re:In other news.... (Score:1, Offtopic)
Re:In other news.... (Score:3)
source of instability and engineering headache, but independently
clocked functional units and fine-grained async designs already
exist, don't they?