The sun may be setting on silicon. Now, computer chips made with carbon nanotubes (one pictured) are the up-and-comers. G. Hills et al/Nature 2019 ...

CNT chips are not only smaller, they're faster, more efficient and they generate much less heat than silicon chips. In other words, CNT chips would give you lightening speed and much longer ...

Scientists have already shown that carbon nanotubes can operate as transistors—electrical switches—when shrunk down to fewer than 10 nanometers, about 1,000 times smaller than a human hair.

IBM’s next-gen chips may swap silicon for carbon nanotubes. By Jay Alabaster. Oct 29, 2012 6:46 am PDT. IBM has hit a milestone in its quest to come up with a successor to silicon computer chips.

Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) can have silicon's semiconductor nature, giving them the on-again off-again electrical abilities crucial to making chip transistors. And they have a superb ability to ...

The problem with silicon chips is that we’ve gotten very good at making them. So very good that we’re approaching the limits of what we can do with the tech, prompting researchers to begin ...

IBM has hit a milestone in its quest to come up with a successor to silicon computer chips. The company said Sunday its research into semiconductors based on carbon nanotubes, or CNTs, has yielded ...

That's why chip researchers will push into new directions -- starting with modifications to the silicon itself. Adding new materials Today's chips are made from silicon wafers 300mm (12 inches) in ...

CNT chips still lag behind silicon chips in terms of integration density. For instance, Nvidia's RTX 5090 GPU, announced in January 2025, contains a staggering 92 billion transistors ...

"We successfully developed the world's first tensor processor chip (TPU) based on carbon nanotubes," Zhiyong Zhang, ... a silicon CPU at the bottom with a CNT TPU on top as a co-processor.

Some may be skeptical about the environmental benefits of using plastic. While it’s true that they do use a polymer (read: plastic) substrate, each chip is just microns thick—thinner than a ...

The technology is viewed as one way to keep shrinking chip sizes once current silicon-based technology hits its limit IBM has hit a milestone in its quest to come up with a successor to silicon ...