A way to replace silicon with carbon in computers of the future is found

Researchers managed to create a new computer system, working without the use of silicon, based on carbon. Among the advantages of computers based on new transistors - their significantly increased performance. The design of such a computer system will be significantly different from the usual, based on silicon. How exactly will carbon computers of the future work?

An engineer from the Erik Jonsson School of Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Texas, Dallas, created a new computer system based entirely on carbon that could replace silicon in transistors of modern electronic devices in the future.

Most of the research was conducted by the assistant professor of electrical and computer technology, Dr. Joseph S. Friedman, when he was a doctoral student at Northwestern University.

The result of his research was a computer system based on carbon-based spintronic logic. The results of the study were published on June 5, 2017 by Joseph Friedman and several co-authors in the online journal Nature Communications . Joseph Friedman is confident that such a computer system will be smaller than that based on silicon transistors, and its performance will increase.

Modern electronic devices are based on transistors, which are tiny silicon structures, allowing negatively charged electrons to pass through silicon, forming an electric current. Transistors work as switches (switches), including and turning off the current.

In addition to the ability to carry an electrical charge, electrons also possess a different quality related to their magnetic properties, which is called spin. In recent years, engineers have studied ways to use the spin characteristics of electrons to create a new class of transistors and devices. This direction is called spintronics, or spin electronics.

The carbon spintronic switch proposed by Joseph Friedman functions as a logical gateway, whose operation is based on the basic principle of electromagnets: when an electric charge passes through a wire, it creates a magnetic field that covers the wire.

In addition, the magnetic field around a two-dimensional carbon tape, called a graphene nanotape, and affects the current passing through the tape. In traditional silicon-based computers, transistors can not reproduce this phenomenon. Instead, they are connected to each other by wires. The output from one transistor is connected by a wire to the input of the next transistor, and thus the transistors are cascaded together.

In the design of the spintronic chip proposed by Joseph Friedman, electrons passing through carbon nanotubes - very thin wires made of carbon - create a magnetic field that affects the current flow in the nearest graphene nanotape, providing cascading logic gateways that are not physically connected .

Since the interaction between graphene nanoclaws is carried out by means of electromagnetic waves, rather than the physical motion of electrons, Joseph Friedman expects that the speed of this interaction will be higher and potentially will provide the clock frequencies counted in terahertz. In addition, these carbon materials can be made smaller than silicon-based transistors, since there are no limitations that are due to the properties of the silicon material.

It should be noted that this concept is still at the drawing board stage, but Joseph Friedman notes that work on the prototype of the carbon cascaded spintronic computer system will continue in the interdisciplinary research laboratory of NanoSpinCompute, which he heads at the University of Texas at Dallas.

What prospects could bring with it computer devices, the clock frequency of which is expressed not in gigahertz, in tererahertz (trillion hertz)?

Based on sciencedaily.com

The article is based on materials https://hi-news.ru/computers/najden-sposob-zameny-kremniya-uglerodom-v-kompyuterax-budushhego.html.