A team of researchers at Peking University has built a carbon nanotube-based working transistor and report that it outperformed larger transistors made with silicon. In their paper published in the journal Science, the team describes how they built the transistor, how it performed and the challenges that still remain before such transistors can be mass produced.
Everyone in the computer business knows the limit to which silicon-based transistors can be made smaller is drawing ever closer, so many teams around the world are searching for a suitable replacement. One of the most promising candidates is carbon nanotubes—due to their unique properties, transistors based on them could be smaller, faster and more efficient. Unfortunately, the difficulty in growing carbon nanotubes and their sometimes persnickety nature means that a way to make them and mass produce them has not been found. In this new effort, the researchers report on a method of creating carbon nanotube transistors that are suitable for testing, but not mass production.
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