IBM demos smallest carbon nanotube transistor
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January 27, 2012
In a rare attempt that defied Moore's Law, IBM has successfully demonstrated the smallest carbon nanotube transistor,
and the company claims the world’s fastest graphene transistor.
The graphene transistor is capable of speeds of up to 100 GHz and features the fastest frequency cutoff yet achieved
by such a semiconductor.
IBM’s announcement, summarizing a paper published in Science Today says that its new device was created using techniques
compatible to those used in advanced silicon device fabrication.
By being able to grow the transistor at a wafer scale (rather than producing a much smaller number of devices at a research
scale), IBM has also successfully demonstrated that the gap is closing rapidly between graphene in the lab and in a chip
foundry.
“The breakthrough that we are announcing demonstrates clearly that graphene can be utilized to produce high performance
transistors and integrated circuits” said Dr Chen, vice president for science and technology at IBM Research.
The 100 GHz device is quite large by current standards – the gate is 240 nm long – but this, IBM says, leaves plenty of
space for gate length to be scaled down. Even with this relatively long gate, the transistor outperforms a similar-scale
silicon device, which it says would be restricted to around 40 GHz.
In its other announcement, IBM is claiming the record for the smallest-ever carbon nanotube transistor. Big Blue's 9
nanometer device, the researchers say, is the first demonstration that carbon nanotubes can be fabricated at geometries
better than 10 nm.
Aaron Franklin, a researcher at IBM’s Watson research center says that it’s important to prove that nanotubes can be
fabricated with such small feature sizes. Quite simply, there’s not much point in researching materials that can’t beat
silicon’s geometry.
IBM says that the 9 nanometer nanotube transistor has lower power consumption than other devices at similar scale, while
being able to handle higher current throughput, and improving its potential signal-to-noise ratio as an extra bonus.
In other IBM news
Power Systems, the IBM division that takes care of Power 7 processors for Big Blue is cutting down prices on its CPU
cards.
So is IBM about to abandon the production of its Power 7 chips anytime soon? Read on...
To be sure, IBM has dozens of different SKUs for processor options across its many servers, and the price cuts which
range from 20 to 30 percent off the prior list prices only apply to six different cards used in three of the Power Systems
7 lineup.
Giant IT suppliers and vendors such as IBM rarely explain why they cut a price on a specific product or service, and
IBM has some specific processor cards rapidly building up in its inventory and it wants to get rid of them to a more
manageable level, at least this is what would make sense from a business perspective.
This is how IBM sells Power-based servers-- you pay for a card with a specific processor that has a base price and
then you pay to activate each core on that processor. IBM's Power 7 processors come in speeds ranging from 3 GHz to 4.1
GHz and with 4, 6, or 8 cores activated, depending on your exact needs.
Specifically, on the entry-level Power 710 server, one card based on the eight-core Power 7 chip running at 3.55 GHz
got a 30 percent price cut on both the base card and the core activations. The card now costs $1,750 and each core costs
$1,152 to turn on.
Now that's a lot more expensive than a simple Xeon or Opteron processor, but then again, that is one more way that IBM
earns its billions in revenue each year.
On the Power 740 rack server, which has a lot more RAM memory and IO expansion, a processor card with the same eight-core
3.55 GHz CPU card now costs $3,339 after a 20 percent price cut, and each core activation got the same price discount and
now costs $2,212. Still a lot or money when compared to a Xeon CPU.
And four processor cards used in the midrange Power 750 server and their core activations also got a 30 percent price
drop as well. An eight-core 3.6 GHz Power 7 processor card now costs $12,390 and core activations cost no less than $6,300,
even after the price cuts.
Source: IBM.
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