label=”Picture Note” class=”text-img-note”>▲Sumio Iijima
Through research on carbon nanotube materials, people have found that it has better semiconductor characteristics than silicon-based materials, especially in terms of high mobility, nanometer size, flexibility, permeability, and biocompatibility. These excellent characteristics mean that carbon-based integrated circuits will have the advantages of high speed and high energy efficiency.
Based on the above performance advantages, compared with silicon-based transistors, carbon nanotube transistors have 5-10 times the speed and energy consumption advantages, and are suitable for high-end electronics applications, high-frequency device applications, optical communication circuit applications, and flexible films Electronics applications.
2. More than 20 years of growth history: IBM/Stanford have entered the game
The discovery of Sumio Iijima opened up the research on carbon nanotubes, and it also provided a foreshadowing for the semiconductor application of carbon nanotubes. In terms of practical applications, IBM is “the first warrior to eat a crab.”
In 1998, IBM researchers produced the first working carbon nanotube transistor. For a long time since then, IBM has been showing a keen interest in carbon nanotube transistors.
In 2012, IBM researchers produced a carbon nanotube transistor with a channel length of 9nm. This is the first transistor in the world that can operate below the 10nm node. In the same year, IBM developed a technology to integrate more than 10,000 carbon nanotube transistors into a single chip based on standard semiconductor manufacturing processes.