Scientists at Intel are predicting the end of Moore’s Law, named after Gordon Moore, one of the company’s founders. More or less, Moore’s law states that technological advances will enable the number of transistors on a chip to double every 18 to 24 months, making chips ever faster. For that to happen, the size of transistors needs to continue to shrink. But, according to this article in CNET News, by 2021 the laws of physics may well bring years of steady progress to an end. Transistors—essentially tiny on-off switches—will be so small that electrons will be able to "tunnel" through the silicon gates inside each transistor that either stop a current (read as "0") or allow it to pass (read as "1").

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One way out of this bind is to replace silicon with still-experimental carbon nanotubes—single-atom-thick sheets of graphite, rolled into a seamless cylinder—that would not allow the tunneling effect. There was good news on that front this week out of the University of Maryland where a new study shows that nanotubes have promising electrical properties. A team of researchers fabricated a semiconducting nanotube transistor that conducted electricity almost 25 percent better than any previous semiconducting material and more than 70 times better than the silicon used in conventional computer chips. "This is the first measurement of the intrinsic conduction properties of semiconducting nanotubes," said Michael Fuhrer, who heads the university’s Nanoelectronics Research Group. "It is an important step forward in efforts to develop nanotubes into the building blocks of a new generation of smaller, more powerful electronics."

# posted by James M. Pethokoukis at 2:00 PM EST
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