IBM announced its acquisition of startup company Cleversafe. (Photo : Reuters)
IBM scientist recently issued a statement that they found a way to shrink transistors past the red brick wall limit. The red brick wall is known in the semiconductor business as the limit in shrinking transistor beyond a certain size.
According to The New York Times, the researchers claimed that they have found a new way to manufacture transistors from parallel rows of carbon nanotubes. The new technology yields to a novel way of connecting ultrathin metal wires into the nanotubes which enables it to continue shrinking the wires' width without increasing electrical resistance.
Before the discovery of this new method, manufacturing smaller transistors means an increase in electrical resistance and heat. These factors limited the design of transistors and also limited the speed of some microchips, which contains transistors.
IBM senior research manager Wilfried Haensch told Wired, "The resistance shoots up so high, the device that you want to control doesn't really matter anymore. Everything is dominated by the contacts."
Experts claimed that this new manufacturing technique will be adopted within the start of the next decade. By then, semiconductor manufacturers should be able to shrink the contact point between two materials to just 40 atoms in width. The researchers also predicted that they should be able to shrink it to as small as 28 atoms within the next three years.
This new technology means that microchip manufacturers can squeeze in more and more transistors without increasing the size of a standard processor. More transistors mean that the chip will also have faster computing speeds. Due to this limit in transistor size, the speed of computer processors has not increased for almost a decade.
