Www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2010/advanced-physicsprize2010.pdf. Intel Granted Patent for Germanium Nanowire Transistors. Intel was granted a patent that covers the use of germanium as a material choice for compound semiconductors that promise faster processors and reduced power consumption. Submitted as a patent application in April of 2010, the company first discussed a related invention at the 2010 International Electron Devices Meeting. Intel disclosed that it had developed P-channel transistors made from germanium, which the company said could be combined with complementary III-V N-channel transistors to form a suitable CMOS architecture. The focus on germanium is largely due to the fact that it is more mobile than silicon. The patent itself reveals the use of a "germanium nanowire channel and the SiGe anchoring regions [that] are formed simultaneously through preferential Si oxidation of epitaxial Silicon Germanium epi layer.
" Intel leverages a silicon fin as a "template" to align germanium nanowires on a chip while silicon-germanium anchors are used to mount to a silicon substrate. NanoConcepts. The rise of graphene : Abstract : Nature Materials. Molybdenite. Graphene is widely regarded as the electronics material of the future, but in an article published over the weekend in the journal Nature Nanotechnology, a group from EPFL's Laboratory of Nanoscale Electronics and Structures (LANES) describes how the abundant mineral molybdenite (MoS2) is a very effective semiconductor with advantages over both graphene and silicon. The discovery could allow for transistors that are smaller and orders of magnitude more efficient. Molybdenite is already used as an additive to lubricants and in some steel alloys, but it previously had not been thoroughly examined for electronic properties.
Compared with silicon, the current standard material used in electronics and chip technology, and graphene, molybdenite enjoys some serious selling points. For one, molybdenite is a two-dimensional material, meaning it is less voluminous than three-dimensional silicon. [PhysOrg] Graphene nanoribbons. IBM Details World's Fastest Graphene Transistor. Thanks to a change in recipe, IBM has created a graphene-based processor that can execute 100 billion cycles per second (100GHz), almost four times the speed of previous experimental graphene chips. With this research, IBM has also shown that graphene-based transistors can be produced by the wafer, which could pave the way for commercial-scale production of graphene chips, said YuMing Lin, the IBM researcher who led the work.
If commercialized, such graphene processors could be the basis of superior signal processing componentry, improving the fidelity of audio and video recording, radar processing and medical imaging. IBM conducted the work on behalf of the U.S. Defense Department's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), under a program to develop high-performance RF (radio frequency) transistors. A write-up of the results has been published in the Feb. 5 issue of Science. Until now, the downside of graphene has been that it is very sensitive to the environment. One-atom transistor. Ever-faster computers face a slowdown because of upcoming physical limits on the size of transistors, the small switches that control electronic processes.
Now researchers have demonstrated the world's tiniest transistor, which passes electric current through a single phosphorus atom -- an achievement that goes beyond classical computing and hints at the future of quantum computing. Scientists have already begun creating quantum processors that store information as qubits (quantum bits), which can represent both the 1 and 0 of binary computer language at the same time.
The newly developed transistor provides not just an extreme example of transistor limits, but also points toward the development of qubits. "In fact, our purpose was not to build the tiniest transistor for a classical computer, but a quantum bit which would be the heart of a quantum computer that is being developed worldwide," said Mikko Mottonen, an applied physicist at the Helsinki University of Technology in Finland. 12-atom memory bit. The world's smallest magnetic data storage unit is made of just 12 atoms, squeezing an entire byte into just 96 atoms, a significant shrinkage in the world of information storage.
It's not a quantum computer, but it's a computer storage unit at the quantum scale. By contrast, modern hard disk drives use about a million atoms to store a single bit, and a half billion atoms per byte. Until now, it was unclear how many (or how few) atoms would be needed to build a reliable, lasting memory bit, the basic piece of information that a computer understands. Researchers at IBM and the German Center for Free-Electron Laser Science decided to start from the ground up, building a magnetic memory bit atom-by-atom. They used a scanning tunneling microscope to create regular patterns of iron atoms aligned in rows of six each. They found two rows was enough to securely store one bit, and eight pairs of rows was enough to store a byte. At the smallest scales, quantum effects blur stored information. Using Heat to Record Information Could Improve Data Storage Speed a Hundred-Fold.
An international team of researchers claims to have figured out a way to use ultrafast bursts of heat, rather than the typical magnetic field, to record a bit of information on a hard drive--a development they say could vastly increase the efficiency and speed of hard drives. They say it could record multiple terabytes per second, hundreds of times faster than current methods.
Typical magnetic recording technology for hard drives uses an external magnetic field to invert the poles of a magnet. The speed of the recording depends on the strength of the magnetic field. But the physicists, led by a team at the University of York, says they have figured out a way to use heat rather than a magnetic field to cause the same effect. The heat in question is a simple ultrafast heat pulse, beamed with a laser. It's very interesting on a theoretical level; this is a change in how we thought data storage worked in pretty basic ways. The article appears in the journal Nature Communications. Scientists Build a Data Storage Device Out of Salmon DNA. It's good smoked, straight up on the grill with a little lemon and butter, or rolled into sushi. And now, thanks to researchers at Taiwan's Tsing Hua University and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology in Germany, salmon is also good sandwiched between two electrodes.
Using silver nanoparticles, a couple of electrodes, and a thin layer of salmon DNA, those researchers have developed a "write-once-read-many-times" (WORM) data-storage device that they think could eventually lead to a replacement for silicon. Their device basically works based on the way silver atoms behave inside a thin film of salmon DNA. Shine a UV light on such a system, and the silver atoms will bunch into nanoparticles within the DNA film. And here's how it works: when there's no (or little) charge passing through the device, only low (or no) current is allowed to travel through the device (which makes sense). [Gizmag]