Building Chips Up Instead of Out

You plan to build a large office building in a densely populated city. Expect that real estate limitations will prevent you from creating a large horizontal structure - so you build up. Several companies are adopting that approach for manufacturing electronic devices. Although the idea isn't new, until now the technology lacked the tools to make it work. Silicon chip fabrication requires temperatures close to 1000° C, complicating the task of making one layer without damaging the one below. These researchers have found an alternate approach that makes transistors out of carbon nanotubes, holding fabrication temperature to only 300° C and thereby allowing multi-level stacked chips. The researchers expect their approach to eventually boost computer performance by three orders of magnitude.

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