Engineers build advanced microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes | Hacker News Reader

Engineers build advanced microprocessor out of carbon nanotubes

phys.org

66 pointslelf12 comments

Already discussed at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20823339

The great thing about research and development like this is by designing practical use cases for carbon nanotubes, its far more likely for large companies (eg TSMC, Samsung, Intel) to pick up and invest large amounts of R&D money to improve yield/production of carbon nanotubes, benefiting everyone involved.

Reminds me of how large phone/computer makers like Apple, Samsung and Huawei help foot the cost of R&D for so many innovations in the tech field (expensive die shrinks, display technology) which ends up trickling to nearly every industry.

Just remember carbon nanotubes are highly carcinogenic.

Is breaking open processors and inhaling the dust a common occurrence where you live?

Although that sounds like fun (for certain values of fun), the issue would exposure during fabrication and possibly during destruction of nano tube containing equipment.

We have to rely on them handling hazardous substances properly anyway since semiconductor manufacturing already involves many of them. They use ClF₃ and sulfuric acid as cleaning agents, phosphine for doping, silane for CVD, etc.

Industrial scale manufacturing of just about anything probably involves quite a few carcinogens.

I'm afraid that there are already a great number of unfriendly chemicals involved in the manufacture of regular old silicon ICs.

I’ve worked in data centers. The constant air circulation causes dust to accumulate in visible places. I assure you, computers are not as sealed up and tidy as you’d think. We used to jokingly call the hard, thick, black dust “cancer”. It’s hard to know what’s in it without study, but when you manufacture something with dangerous materials some amount of that material makes it onto and into the finished product. I’m not advocating for alarm, but your po-pi-ing comment was designed to minimize and it demands counterpoint.

You're not breathing silicon dust!

Chips in all computers are highly encased, either in ceramic, hard plastic, metal, or some combination. They're never, ever, exposed to the air circulating through a computer, because the dust would destroy the delicate circuitry.

If you're regularly cracking open chips to snack on them, you have bigger problems...

As with anything nanotubes, scalability and yield are the bottleneck and have been for the last ~20 years. Not sure we've made much progress in the 10 years since I was a great student in the field?

The article points out different ways yield is increased to get to a practical level

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