The future of computing – carbon nanotubes and superconductors to replace the silicon chip

IOP

28 March 2008

The future of computing

The future of computing is under the spotlight at the Institute of Physics’ Condensed Matter and Materials Physics conference at the Royal Holloway College of the University of London on 26-28 March.

The end of the silicon chip

The silicon chip, which has supplied several decades’ worth of remarkable increases in computing power and speed, looks unlikely to be capable of sustaining this pace for more than another decade.

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Replacing the chip with carbon nanotubes

At the conference, researchers at Leeds University in the UK will report an important step towards one prospective replacement. Carbon nanotubes, discovered in 1991, are tubes of pure carbon just a few nanometres wide – about the width of a typical protein molecule, and tens of thousands of times thinner than a human hair. Because they conduct electricity, they have been proposed as ready-made molecular-scale wires for making electronic circuitry.

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Boosting computer power with superconductors

Two further talks at the meeting describe an even more dramatic way to overcome the limitations of silicon computers. Hans Mooij of the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands and Raymond Simmons of the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colorado, USA, will claim that superconductors – materials that conduct electricity with zero electrical resistance – can harness the power of quantum physics to boost computer power tremendously.

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