Carbon nanotube computer.pdfVIP

LETTER doi:10.1038/nature12502 Carbon nanotube computer 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Max M. Shulaker , Gage Hills , Nishant Patil , Hai Wei , Hong-Yu Chen , H.-S. Philip Wong Subhasish Mitra The miniaturization of electronic devices has been the principal to incorrect logic functionality, whereas metallic CNTs have little or driving force behind the semiconductor industry, and has brought no bandgap, resulting in high leakage currents and incorrect logic about major improvements in computational power and energy functionality20. The imperfection-immune design methodology, which efficiency. Although advances with silicon-based electronics continue combines circuit design techniques with CNT processing solutions, to be made, alternative technologies are being explored. Digital cir- overcomes these problems20,21. It enables us to demonstrate, for the cuits based on transistors fabricated from carbon nanotubes CNTs first time, a complete CNT computer, realized entirely using CNFETs. have the potential to outperform silicon by improving the energy– Similar to the first silicon-based computers, our CNTcomputer, which is delay product, a metric of energy efficiency, by more than an order a synchronous digital system built entirely from CNFETs, runs stored of magnitude. Hence, CNTs are an exciting complement to existing programs and is programmable. Our CNT computer runs a basic opera- semiconductor technologies1,2. Owing to substantial fundamental ting system that performs multitasking, meaning that it can execute imperfections inherent in CNTs, however, only very basic circuit multiple programs concurrently in an interleaved fashion . We demon- blocks have been demonstrated. Here we show how these imperfec- strate our CNT computer by concurrently executing a counting program tions can be overcome, and demonstrate the first computer built and an integer-sorting program coordinated by a basic multitasking entirely using CNT-based transistors. The CNT computer runs