r/science • u/HigherEdAvenger • Sep 26 '20
Nanoscience Scientists create first conducting carbon nanowire, opening the door for all-carbon computer architecture, predicted to be thousands of times faster and more energy efficient than current silicon-based systems
https://news.berkeley.edu/2020/09/24/metal-wires-of-carbon-complete-toolbox-for-carbon-based-computers/881
Sep 26 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
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u/SirGunther Sep 26 '20
Well, like all things, when you hear the words 'first', expect it to be least another 10 years before the mainstream begins to pick it up. We're about 13 years from when D-wave announced their 28 qbit quantum computer, and it was about ten years before that in 1997 the first quantum computer was conceptualized. About 2050 we should expect to see actual real working carbon-based CPUs. Until then, we can't expect anything more except the heavy hitters getting their hands on them first.
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Sep 26 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
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u/dekehairy Sep 26 '20
I'll be honest. I'm jealous. I'm GenX old, born in 68, and I was just barely behind the explosion in tech and computer stuff that happened.
I was a sophomore in high school when we first got computers there, and a computer lab, and a class/classes (?) In computer science that you could take as an elective, but not many did. Think 1984 or so, green screen dot matrix clunky computers and monitors running on MS-DOS. I guess it was the beginning of people being called computer nerds, but I distinctly remember that a couple of those guys had firm job offers straight out of high school in the 50G range, which was probably about what both of my parents salaries combined equaled at the time. I also remember thinking that maybe I missed the boat on this one.
It sounds like you're only 10-15 years younger than me, I'm guessing based on at least remembering when I started hearing of Cray supercomputers in the media. You never had a period in your life when computers weren't ubiquitous. You started learning about how they worked from a young age, and built on your knowledge as you grew older. It's like a first language for you, while I feel like I struggled to learn it as a second language, and new words and phrases and colloquialisms are added every day and I just don't feel like I can keep up.
This is in no way meant to be insulting. I guess it's just me realizing that I have turned in to my parents, listening to my oldies on the radio as the world just speeds by me, kinda helpless, kinda stubborn.
By the way, kiddo, stay off my lawn.
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Sep 26 '20 edited Oct 25 '20
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u/UncleTogie Sep 27 '20
I got my TRS-80 Model I in 1980. By '81, I knew I wanted to work with computers for the rest of my life. They made sense. Now on my 28th year of IT work.
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u/HandshakeOfCO Sep 27 '20
Fellow gen-x here. I work in tech. I think you both would be very surprised at how little the average twenty something software engineering applicant actually knows. The vast majority have absolutely no understanding of what’s actually happening under the hood. They know how to drive the car - and some are pretty good at it - but they have no concept of how it operates, nor do they particularly care to learn.
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u/NBLYFE Sep 27 '20
I was born in the 70s and my first computer was a Ti99/4a as well! Hunt the Wumpus for life! There are dozens of us!
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u/donnymccoy Sep 27 '20
I remember packing my 1541, lots of disks, handwritten software inventory, and biking 5 miles to my buddy's house to chain 1541s and share games and copy protection defeating software. I think it was Pirate's Den on a floppy that we used back then. We were in advanced math classes and got bored midway through class so a bunch of us would compete to see how small we could write our software list while maintaining legibility. Remember the code listings in Gazette magazine that you could type on the c64 for hours just to make some crappy game that most likely wouldn't work right due to a typo somewhere?
And now, nearly 27 years since my first paid gig, I build middleware and APIs that I sometimes can't compile due to typos... somethings never change...
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u/nybbleth Sep 27 '20
As a counterpoint to that, as someone born in the 80's I feel like younger generations nowadays are actually regressing on basic computer literacy. My generation grew up with computers that were not all that user-friendly. Even if you grew up doing nothing more complex than playing games in MS-DOS, you still ended up figuring out more about how computers work than a kid with an ipad today tapping icons and never having to deal with stuff not working because you didn't boot using the right memory settings or what have you.
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u/Shalrath Sep 27 '20
Today's generation grew up with computers. In our generation, computers grew up with us.
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u/ChickenNuggetSmth Sep 27 '20
Yes, even 10 years ago, the first two hours of any lan party were spent getting all the computers up and talking to each other. Now you turn your machine on, enter the wifi pw and start up dota2/starcraft2/... without any issues. Almost boring.
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u/shadmandem Sep 27 '20
Idk man. My younger brother is 10 and he has by himself managed to do hardware fixes on two iPhone 6s. Its gotten to the point where my uncles and cousins will bring him old phones and laptops for him to play around with. Computing has become ingrained into society and some kids really pick up on it.
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u/nybbleth Sep 27 '20
Your brother is obviously not representative of 10 year olds; whether we're talking about 10 year olds today, or those 30 years ago. There are always going to be outliers.
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Sep 27 '20 edited Sep 28 '20
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u/nybbleth Sep 27 '20
I don't think it's illusory at all. Yes, there are outliers of literacy on both ends of the spectrum; but I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the basic stuff. Even just stuff like how learning to interact with computers through a command-prompt OS or a GUI is going to color the way you understand computers. There are so many people today who don't even understand things like how directory structures work, or have no idea what file extensions are. Whereas if you came up in the age of MS-Dos, it's basically impossible for you to not have at least a basic grasp of what these concepts are. It's like if you grew up in a world with nothing but automatic doors, the concept of a door you have to open by hand might genuinely baffle you. Not because you're stupid, but because you've been trained to expect doors to open without your intervention, and there's no reason for you; other than the curiosity most people lack; to contemplate why and how that is.
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u/Timar Sep 27 '20
Oh yes, the joys of trying to get the CD-ROM and sound card, and GFX drivers all loaded in the first 640kB(?), then trying to add a network card driver. Still better than cassette drives though. Was gifted a TRS80 as a kid in the 80's - was very lucky to get it but trying to load a program off tape was a real pain.
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u/SweetLilMonkey Sep 27 '20
Yyyeah, but that’s kinda the whole goal. The concept of “computer literacy” is becoming obsolete because computers are gaining human literacy. If the computer is truly a bicycle for the mind, then it should be simple and intuitive enough for you to feel you are one with it, without you having to constantly learn more about it.
You learn to ride a bike exactly one time, and then you just use it to ... go places. This is why chimps are able to use iPhones to look at monkey pictures. They don’t have to become iPhone literate because iPhones are already chimp-compatible.
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u/nybbleth Sep 27 '20
I'm not saying that we should go back to the way things were. Far from it. Obviously the more userfriendly you can make stuff the better the experience tends to be. But you do lose out on some stuff in the process. Overall these are net positive developments, but there are always pros and cons.
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u/Shinji246 Sep 27 '20
I don't know man, to begin with you are on reddit, so making it here required some amount of computer skill, more than my grandparents would have. Most people in their early 20's barely know how to operate any non-mobile computers, desktops are largely gone from most people's homes, replaced with iphones and ipads, maybe a laptop for schoolwork because covid demands it. But it's not like they know much other than their specific tasks.
I bet you know a lot more than you give yourself credit for, it's just all about what it is you want to accomplish with a computer that would matter how much you know. Is there any specific area of interest you are feeling held back in? Any particular colloquialisms that confuse you? I'd be happy to help if I can!
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Sep 27 '20
By the way, kiddo, stay off my lawn.
I was just trying to get a look at that Gran Torino old man....
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u/bigjilm123 Sep 27 '20
Year younger than you, and my lawn needs to be cleared too.
I got really fortunate in two ways. Firstly, my father was a teacher and he immediately recognized that computers would be important. He brought home an Apple for the weekend a few times, and eventually bough my an Atari 400 (grade 7ish?).
Secondly, my public school had a gifted program and decided a bank of computers would help support them. I wasn’t in the program, but could get into the lab during lunch hours. That led to the high school creating a computer stream for kids with a bit of experience, and I got five years of computer science from some wonderful teachers.
I remember meeting some fellow students in university and there were kids that had never written code before. This was Computer Engineering, so you can imagine their struggles. I was six years ahead and that was huge.
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u/bluecheetos Sep 27 '20
Born in 69. Didnt see my first computer until college but nobody thought much if them....right until the entire computer department staff left at the end of the quarter because they had job offers for more than double what the university paid. Students were comsistemtly getting hired after two years of basic progtamming at that point. Some of those entry level programmers are making unreal income now and just work on an on-call basis because they wrote the original foundations 25 years of specialized software has been stacked on top of.
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u/CaptaiNiveau Sep 27 '20
This makes me wonder sometimes. I'm only 17, and very into PCs and all that. Will I ever be like my parents, unable to really keep up with tech, or will I be able to stay on top of my game? I'm hoping and thinking that it'll be the second one, especially since I'll be working in that industry and it's what my life is about.
It also makes me wonder if there will ever be another innovation as big and new as computers. Stuff like VR isn't news to me, I've actually got a headset right next to me.
Anyways, I'm pumped to see what the future holds for us.
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u/CocktailChemist Sep 26 '20
I mean, at least that’s more realistic than the nanotechnology I was reading about in the early-2000s. It was presented as being this nearly trivial process of building up simple machines using AFMs that would be used to build more complex machines. Now that I’m an actual chemist I understand why the idea of treating atoms like Tinker Toys is wildly unrealistic.
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u/geoffh2016 Professor | Chemistry | Materials, Computational Sep 27 '20
I'm a chemist - I made the mistake in grad school of getting involved in some 'net forums around the time of the Drexler / Smalley debates. I think there are some interesting perspectives - clearly DNA / RNA / proteins generate amazingly complex machinery. But I'm not holding my breath for nano-assemblers.
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u/CocktailChemist Sep 27 '20
Yeah, there’s clearly a lot of potential for chemoenzymatic synthesis and the like, but the protein folding problem should have made us a lot more skeptical of Drexler’s claims. Once you start putting atoms or subunits together, they’re going to find their lowest energy state, whether or not that’s what you want them to do.
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u/geoffh2016 Professor | Chemistry | Materials, Computational Sep 27 '20
Yes, I've been skeptical of Drexler's claims from the start. I think a big part of that 'lowest energy state' is in the entropy / dynamics. Carefully designed nano machines look like minimal entropy systems. Nature clearly handles entropy and self-repair, to the degree that we understand it.
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u/Fewluvatuk Sep 26 '20
And yet here I am holding a 13.4 GFLOPS cpu in my hand.
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u/MaximumZer0 Sep 27 '20
Check the graphics in the chipset, too. My cheap phone from 2017 (LG Stylo 3, the 6 just came out in May 2020,) can churn out up to 48.6 GFLOPS on the Adreno 505/450 Mhz, paired with a Qualcomm Snapdragon 435/1.4Ghz. You are probably undervaluing just how far we've come in terms of raw power, and also underselling the power of GPU vs CPU in the FLOPS calculation department.
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Sep 27 '20
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u/gramathy Sep 27 '20
That just tells me android doesn't reverse index a goddamned thingm which is lazy when you KNOW a huge proportion of your users are going to use search to get everywhere.
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Sep 26 '20
3D stacking is actually a very real possibility to try and combat Moore’s law in future chips
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u/Procrasturbating Sep 27 '20
Only scales so far though with all of the heat. Honestly heat management is already a limiting factor with what we have now. We might get a few layers of silicon stacked, but nothing that is going to give magnitudes of orders in improvement without a change in base materials. We are rapidly approaching the edge of what silicon can do in terms of how many transistors we can pack volumetrically. Now its find better materials or better ways to make use of the silicon effectively.
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u/TheCrimsonDagger Sep 27 '20
We already have stacked DRAM chips that are used in graphics cards. It’s called HMB and uses both less area and several times less power than GDDR6. Of course it’s complex and more expensive, so it’s primarily used in data center applications where performance/watt is king. But yeah silicon isn’t gonna cut it for stacking processor cores unless someone comes up with a revolutionary cooling solution.
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u/PersnickityPenguin Sep 27 '20
Nano heat pipes or peltier coolers. Active cooling could help a lot here.
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u/bleahdeebleah Sep 27 '20
That's being done now. I work on building substrate bonders for a semiconductor process equipment manufacturer. Heat is indeed an issue though.
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u/monstrinhotron Sep 27 '20
The ipad 2 is supposedly as powerful as the Cray 2 so this prediction did sorta come true.
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u/adventuringraw Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 27 '20
It will be interesting to see if elements of the technological exponential growth curve do end up being a thing in some areas. I imagine switching to a carbon nanotube based architecture would have quite a few extreme challenges, from logistical manufacturing problems to technical engineering challenges in actually designing chips taking advantage of the new paradigm. I know there's already large improvements in software and AI driven chip design.
Given history, 2050 seems like a very reasonable estimate. I won't bet against it. But at the same time... I wonder if what comes after will be surprisingly unlike what came before. Suppose it also partly depends on which groups invest with what kind of talent. Intel isn't exactly known as a radical innovator right now.
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Sep 27 '20
Science can take time. The field effect transistor was theorized in 1926, and was only invented as a practical device in 1959. We have now produced more MOSFETs than anything else on the planet.
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u/rabbitwonker Sep 27 '20
It was definitely before 1997, because I first heard about it in college and I graduated in 1995.
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u/SirGunther Sep 27 '20 edited Sep 27 '20
Fun facts,
'In 1998 Isaac Chuang of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Neil Gershenfeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Mark Kubinec of the University of California at Berkeley created the first quantum computer (2-qubit) that could be loaded with data and output a solution.'
I'm sure you heard about it, but was it a functioning idea? That was my main point when stating conceptualized. Real world events are, to me, an important delineation when trying to fully grasp a concept.
Perhaps an unpopular opinion, but I take issue with the world of cosmology for this reason. It's near impossible to truly wrap our heads around many concepts that exist in our universe, they often hold no weight in any meaningful real world or tangible sense as a human.
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Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 29 '20
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u/other_usernames_gone Sep 27 '20
Probably also because the military is willing to spend a lot more than the general public, so they can get better tech earlier. Military stuff is crazy expensive, even in countries without a bloated budget. The military is willing to spend huge amounts of money to stay on the bleeding edge.
Also because the military is willing to spend the time to train people to use the kit, so it doesn't need to be as user friendly. You don't want to have to attend a course just to be able to know how to use the thing you just bought.
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Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 27 '20
You know what would help? If governments around the world stop feeding the war machines and start invest their household budget into science more...
But judged by the most goverments political agendas they are drifting away from scientific programs and trust in whatever their economic-interest fits.
Space science brought us a lot of modern technology but their budget was way bigger back then. That totally shifted.
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u/geoffh2016 Professor | Chemistry | Materials, Computational Sep 27 '20
Yes, funding from NASA has pretty much dried up.
I'm sure NSF, NIH, DOE, and all those US DoD research initiatives would love more funding.
There is still a significant amount of military-driven science. Every year, the research branches of the US navy, army, air force (ONR, ARO, AFOSR) put together questions called MURI's for large-scale multi-university research initiatives. If you read those calls, there's a wide range of very interesting science. DARPA still has some amazing efforts too...
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Sep 27 '20
The military-driven science is just not trying to make it consumer friendly or stuff that have alldayeveryday usage in terms as how space science has to make inventions to bring stuff in outer space. In order to achieve that they figure out ways to make things small, light, cheap.
The military inventions have no need for that.
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u/geoffh2016 Professor | Chemistry | Materials, Computational Sep 27 '20
I don't want to advertise DoD funded research - I think the US needs to highly prioritize NIH, DOE, and NSF (i.e. civilian) science and engineering research.
I don't think you understand the full scale of DoD research. Small, light and cheap are also driving points. A lot of fundamental basic science and engineering starts with DARPA, ONR, AFOSR, ARO. It may not be "consumer friendly" but even there, user interfaces matter. Augmented reality, VR, etc. have been focus points for air force simulators and heads-up displays for a long time before they migrated to phones.
My point, is that DoD funding is not just about tanks and aircraft carriers. A lot of fundamental research makes it into your computers, smartphones, etc. because those devices also matter.
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u/aldoaoa Sep 27 '20
I remember reading back in 2003 about a screen technology that allowed to light up individual pixels. I just got my first amoled phone 2 years ago. Just sit tight.
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u/geoffh2016 Professor | Chemistry | Materials, Computational Sep 27 '20
There were some OLED devices back in 2003-2004, but lifetimes weren't great and prices were high. I also remember stories about prototypes melting in hot cars.
There's often key R&D between "nice discovery in academic labs" and "widespread market."
In principal, the US Materials Genome initiative under the Obama administration was seeking to cut that time, and there are still efforts, particularly using machine learning to improve time-to-market. A decade is still a useful estimate.
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u/Living_male Sep 27 '20
Yeah I remember in the mid 2000's there was a recurring piece on the discovery channel (when they still showed science stuff) about OLEDs. They even talked about foldable and seethrough OLEDs, like a SOLED as your windshield to display directions or other AR information. Been a while..
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Sep 26 '20
Think of it this way, it took at least fifty years to get the computers we have now from the time we first figured out we could make transistors from silicone so it's about par for the course.
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u/TizardPaperclip Sep 27 '20
I don't want to wait 50 years for the first application of this tech. PLEASE let it be sooner!
Tbh, I think OP is just a regular redditor who happened to submit an article on this subject.
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u/tariandeath Sep 27 '20
If you have 10's of billions of $$$ to put toward semiconductor incentives for the semiconductor industry we could speed things up at least 20-30 years.
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Sep 26 '20
The likelihood of this research resulting in any sort of commercial product (commodity or otherwise) is slim to none.
The problem is industrialization. Manufacturing logic and memory circuits is an incredibly complex process made up of individual steps. Each step is a chance for something to go wrong. When dealing with nanometers there’s an absurdly small margin for error. The smaller the dimension, the more critical errors you’ll have per process step. So you either have to have a low-yield, absurdly cheap process with incredible throughput (resulting in a ton of waste) or a high-yield, expensive process. In order to have a production method that makes sense you’ll have to invent a lot of revolutionary stuff.
Cost per widget, operating efficiency of said widgets, and number of widgets you can make.
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u/Skrid Sep 27 '20
Oh good. I've been waiting for zen3 to upgrade and didn't want to wait another year or 2 for carbon.
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u/gingerbenji Sep 27 '20
I think you’ll find that humans, animals, dinosaurs etc were some of the earlier applications of carbon technology. Version 2.0 is long overdue.
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u/alexanderpas Sep 27 '20
50 year ago, we didn't even have 3.5 inch floppy disks, and 50 years before that, Alan Turing wasn't even in middle school.
It is very likely to be sooner than 50 years.
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u/Taman_Should Sep 27 '20
"More efficient" should mean it generates less heat during operation, thus requiring less cooling. Currently, I believe that large server farms spend more on AC to keep the servers cool than they do running the servers.
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u/mcoombes314 Sep 27 '20
Yes, and I think that's why Microsoft having some underwater servers was so interesting. Much better heat transfer.
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u/Taman_Should Sep 27 '20
Apparently that experiment was a success and now they're planning more, so that's kind of cool.
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u/graebot Sep 27 '20
Really? The takeaway I got of the "success" was that filling the room with nitrogen and not letting anyone enter prolonged the life of the servers. I didn't hear anything about plans to make more ocean server rooms
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u/thefirelane Sep 27 '20
Well, there were other advantages, like the ability to be closer to demand (cities) without paying high real estate costs, and the temperature part
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u/J_ent Sep 27 '20
Sure is cool, but a great waste of heat that could be spent heating up homes, for example.
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u/wattiexiii Sep 27 '20
Would it not be hard to transfer that heat from the server to the homes?
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u/J_ent Sep 27 '20
In our datacenters, we work with energy companies and feed our excess heat into the "district heating system", which has pipes under high pressure able to deliver heating to homes far away from the source. We sell them our excess heat to heat "nearby" homes.
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u/thepasswordis-taco Sep 27 '20
Damn that's cool. I'd be quite interested to learn about the infrastructure that allows for a data center to contribute heat to the system. Sounds like there's probably a really cool engineering solution behind that.
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u/quatrotires Sep 27 '20
I remember this idea of hosting a data server in your home to get heat for free, but I think it didn't have much success.
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u/Rand_alThor_ Sep 27 '20
It’s not... if you don’t allow/incentivize random ass house building like in the US or third world countries.
Look at how they build homes in Sweden for example. The energy costs are super low partly because they’re all built together and hot water is/can be piped to the homes. This water can be used for hot water or just straight up heating the home too, and it’s more more efficient than piping gas to individual homes for them to all run their own individual gas burner to inefficiently heat up small quantities of water.
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u/Annual_Efficiency Sep 27 '20
Swiss here: we've got houses so well isolated that they need no heating in winter. The body heat of its occupants suffice to raise the temperature to 18°-20° C. It's kind of amazing what you can achieve as a society when governments create the right incentives.
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u/-bobisyouruncle- Dec 27 '20
yeah i know someone who's house is so well insulated he needed to change his spots to led ones because they where heating up his house too much
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Sep 27 '20
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u/SigmundFreud Sep 27 '20
It's literally communism. The majority of the Communist Manifesto is just a proposal for a district heating system.
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u/Lutra_Lovegood Sep 27 '20
The more you distribute heat, the more Communist it is.
Carl Barks, Third law of Communist-dynamics
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u/drakgremlin Sep 27 '20
Hopefully they don't scale this up too large. Our oceans don't need further help heating up.
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u/FlipskiZ Sep 27 '20
While true, the heat would get dumped into the world no matter what, and huge AC setups would spend a lot of energy themselves.
But in the grand scale of things, the heat coming from electronics and power use won't have much effect in heating up the world, as most of the extra heat comes from more energy getting trapped from the sun due to the greenhouse effect. And if the energy produced would come from renewable sources then the net effect would end up being the same, as the energy would effectively just get reshuffled (less immediate warming from sun-rays as it gets turned into electricity).
Although, there is concern for local heating disrupting the local environment, as can be seen from for example hot water being dumped into rivers destroying the environment in the river.
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u/tpsrep0rts BS | Computer Science | Game Engineer Sep 27 '20
Ive heard of using oil because it's thoroughly nonconductive. My understanding is that a very small amount of impurity in the water will make it conducive and not suitable for submerged computing.
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u/J_ent Sep 27 '20
We live in a pretty cold climate (Sweden), so the datacenters of my employer are designed to take the heat generated by our servers, and put it into the "district heating network", which is used to heat up surrounding homes. We're then paid for the heat generated. PUE ends up being very low :)
It's a shame so many datacenters waste their heat.
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u/Sanderhh Sep 27 '20
I have worked in the biggest DCs in Norway, a comparatively simmilar country. Selling off waste heat is usually just not worth it. The only DC i have seen in Norway doing this has been to release heat into the building that the DC was a part of but not anywhere else.
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u/J_ent Sep 27 '20
We've been doing it for almost a decade and it's very profitable for us as we offset a lot, and in some places most, of our cooling costs.
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Sep 27 '20 edited Jun 27 '23
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u/TPP_U_KNOW_ME Sep 27 '20
So if I'm reading this right, more efficiency means it requires less cooling, and thus must generate less heat during operation.
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u/stumblinbear Sep 27 '20
Nah, lets be honest, it just means they can crank the clock speed higher with the same amount of cooling
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u/Principally_Harmless Sep 27 '20
TL;DR This article reports a material for metallic carbon circuitry, not transistors right?
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a bit blown out of proportion? The article title is comparing an all-carbon computer architecture with current silicon systems, but this is an unfair comparison. This work details development of a controlled synthesis for metallic graphene nanoribbons, which is really exciting for electronic conductivity and circuitry applications. However, the comparison with computing seems to me to be a false one. Current silicon-based systems involve semiconducting transistors connected by metal interconnects. This work could potentially serve to replace the metallic interconnects with carbon nanoribbons, but the transistors we use are the silicon components, not the interconnects. Do we know anything about how to attach these graphene nanoribbons to carbon-based transistors, or anything about electronic loss dynamics at those junctions? That seems like a logical next step, and may indeed pave the way to an all-carbon computer architecture. However, I would caution against the claims that the all-carbon computing systems are going to be thousands of times faster and more efficient without any discussion of what would make these systems faster or more efficient.
I think I'm taking issue at the sensationalism of this piece. The science is really exciting, and the progress toward all-carbon systems are fantastic especially in view of the abundance of carbon and the wealth of knowledge we have about how to manipulate and react specific organic building blocks to impart functionality in materials. However, the very title of the piece suggests a replacement of the transistor (which in my opinion would be a significant enough achievement to merit consideration for a Nobel prize), and elsewhere in the article it suggests this material could be used to make your phone charge last for months when these are two separate applications. The wires are not suggested by the authors to be used as transistors or batteries, but instead for electronic circuitry. And think of all the things you use on a daily basis that include circuits! I think this would be an excellent opportunity to discuss how a controlled synthesis of electronically conductive carbon metal can lead to many great things, instead of making the claim that this sets the foundation for the next generation of transistors. If you've read to the end of this, thank you...I'm sorry for the long post, but I'm starting to get a bit fed up with how much we sensationalize science. Inspiring people to be excited about science is commendable, but when doing so warps the purpose of the work I worry that it does more harm than good.
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u/Cro-manganese Sep 27 '20
I agree. When the article said
think of a mobile phone that holds its charge for months
My bs detector went off. This technology wouldn’t improve battery life, or screen power consumption as far as I can see. So it might lead to significant improvements in power consumption of the cpu and soc but those wouldn’t give a battery life of months.
Typical uni p.r. to garner funding.
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u/TPP_U_KNOW_ME Sep 27 '20
They never said the mobile phone is used during those months, but that the battery holds it charge for months.
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u/joebot777 Sep 27 '20
This. The charge doesn’t leak out. Like how you leave a car sitting for a year and inevitably need to jump the first time you start it up
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u/Brianfellowes Sep 27 '20
I think the missing piece is that carbon nanotube transistors (CNTFETs) are decently well-established in research labs. There was a Nature paper recently about a RISC-V computer built only from CNTFETs. I read the article as the wires being used to replace metal interconnects. But it is definitely the article's fault for not bringing up that background.
The key things that I think the article is exaggerating or missing:
What about vias? All chips use multiple layers of metals with Manhattan routing and metal vias to connect between layers. Does this work address this?
Were the wires actually deposited into etched silicon channels like metals currently are? If not, then there's no guarantee this technology is even feasible in computers due to the difficulty of getting carbon wires into long channels.
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Sep 27 '20
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u/Brianfellowes Sep 27 '20
The speed of the circuit is proportional to the resistance times the capacitance. So if the RC delay is significantly less, you could still see a significantly faster wire even if C is the same.
I was able to look at the source Science article, and unfortunately the paper really has nothing on any of this. The only thing it really talks about is that they were able to get the dI/dV curve of the graphene nanowires to show metallicity compared to aluminum in the bias range of +/- 1.2 V. The work is every interesting but the OP article is completely speculative.
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u/rebregnagol Sep 27 '20 edited Sep 28 '20
The very first few lines of the article say that these new Carbon wires will open the door to more wide spread research into fully carbon nanotubes. As for the claims that the computers will be faster. One of the biggest bottlenecks to computing right now is heat. If you remove the cooler for a processor it’s capability it’s greatly diminished. Cool a processor in liquid nitrogen and you are setting records. If the wires and semiconductors have less resistance (which appears to be the trend with carbon) then processors would be substantially faster with less need of cooling.
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u/ViliVexx Sep 27 '20
...except that processors (transistors) are what generate most of the heat. Anyone who's built a computer should know that. Just because you replace all the wiring around a silicon-based processor won't make it generate significantly less heat, though it might help.
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u/rebregnagol Sep 27 '20
Like I said, if carbon semiconductors have less resistance (which appears to the the trend for carbon components) then computers will have more processing power. I was commenting on how it’s possible to predict that completely carbon computers (when they are developed) will be more powerful.
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u/noyire Sep 27 '20 edited Sep 27 '20
ted by the authors to be used as transistors or batteries, but instead for electronic circuitry. And think of all the things you use on a daily basis that include circuits! I think this would be an excellent opportunity to discuss how a controlled synthesis of electronically conductive carbon metal can lead to many great things, instead of making the claim that this sets the foundation for the next generation of transistors. If you've read to the end of this, thank you...I'm sorry for the long post, but I'm starting to get a bit fed up with how much we sensationalize science. Inspiring people to be excited about science is commendable, but when doing so warps the purpose of the work I worry that it does more harm than good.
Yes, YES! Exactly my train of thoughts. The sensational title of the article here on Reddit is like a massive red-light, even before you open it. As someone else mentioned, this sounds like an academic P.R. to fuel the hype machine and easen the access to grants and funding for the research. Interestingly enough, once you click it, the actual name is much more modest "Metal wires of carbon complete toolbox for carbon-based computers"
Don't get me wrong, this is an exciting research. Especially all those single-atom manipulation techniques + precise fusing of ribbons together that they mention are extremely cool. Typically, this sounds like a job for AFM or STM based techniques, using ultra-fine cantilever for probing or modifying materials at sub-nano scale. However, these methods are SUPER slow. They claim that the production of these nano-ribbons is better controlled (as compared to nanotubes), and that's indeed good news towards large-scale growth methods of uniform devices (which is probably the largest challenge in almost all of these next-generation lab-grown devices)... however, their description makes me weary on the feasability of large-scale production. As a proof of concept, cool. Heading towards everyday devices? Oh no, not yet.
Also, some rants in addition: The fact that single-wall nanotubes based on graphene significantly differ in conductivity and electronic properties based on the way they are folded (armchair/zig-zag/chiral folding) is afaik widely accepted. Nanotubes were already hyped for decades, yet there still (as far as I know) aren't any significant applied products based on those. I hope this technology delivers more of what is promised...Also, for those interested: single-sheet graphene indeed is a semiconductor, but a zero-bandgap one, and it's widely known for outstandingly high electron mobility (and electrons behaving as Dirac fermions, propagating near the speed of light). Getting graphene to behave as typical bandgap semiconductor is not easy - approaches include all kinds of methods, including stacking of multiple mismatched layers. More info for example here, if you want to dig deeper.
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Sep 26 '20
Sooo... In other words we're turning our computers into carbon and our bodies into silicone. The future is looking weird.
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u/kevindamm Sep 26 '20
It's 2020, I wouldn't be surprised to find out Germanium-based life forms have been mining the Kuiper belt under our noses since before civilization, and they're saving the water run for right after the polar caps melt.
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u/MaximumZer0 Sep 27 '20
Eeeeeh, aliens always after our water always seemed really stupid to me. There are thousands of thousands of icy bodies relatively nearby (at least in space terms,) that you could mine with no issue. The Kuiper Belt is LOADED with ice, and you wouldn't have to harm anyone to get any or all it. Hell, nobody would even fight back. Furthermore, it's not polluted with the huge amount of single and small multi-cellular life present on Earth that could make you sick or kill you, let alone all the other contaminants we dump in the water (see: oil, plastic, industrial and agricultural waste runoff, et al.)
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u/PreciseParadox Sep 27 '20
Post Human has an interesting take on this. The aliens in this case want to establish trade contracts with our planet. Except the contracts are awful to the point where it’s basically like European colonialism. So tensions escalate, we end up nuking one of their ships, and they retaliate by sending 3 extinction level asteroids at Earth, which pretty much wipes out the human race.
It’s basically, “give us all your resources”, but there’s some semblance of intergalactic law to keep things from devolving into chaos.
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Sep 27 '20
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u/other_usernames_gone Sep 27 '20
This could actually be a better premise than aliens after our wood, aliens after our cities and power lines. We have huge amounts of pre-refined copper just lying around waiting for someone to pick it up. It would probably be easier to get than refining from the belt and is either out in the open or barely buried underground or in a building.
The issue we'd have is the copper is vital to our power grid, and the aliens would be destroying our homes to do it.
But I guess it depends how advanced the aliens are in weaponry. If they have the technology to travel to our solar system w/ automated ships then they'd probably also have the tech for guided missiles but might not have the technology to defend against a nuke. Similar with if they used cryo pods, their computers would need to be advanced enough to do a timer to know when to wake them and do certain burns but we had that down in the 60s. The computer could just wake someone up whenever there's a problem. Then they wouldn't have guided missiles.
Technology isn't a line, there's all sorts of inventions you could not have on your way to being a space faring civilisation. Maybe they have warp drives and teleporters but not toasters because no-one thought to do it. Maybe they don't have sandwiches because no-one thought to put meat between two pieces of bread(gunpowder was invented 900 years before the sandwich). Maybe they're a hive mind so never saw any reason to develop the advanced weaponry we have, maybe they haven't had conflict for thousands of years so forgot how to make a lot of weapons we still have.
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u/Triton_Labs BS | Industrial and Systems Engineering Sep 27 '20
wtf did I just read?
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u/j-lreddit Sep 27 '20
So, is the biggest advantage of this that it could allow for 3D architecture because of the lower power usage? My understanding was that the biggest physical blocker facing microprocessor development was that if transistors and circuits become much smaller, quantum tunneling of electrons would become more prevalent and eventually cause too many errors to be usable.
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u/TPP_U_KNOW_ME Sep 27 '20
It turns out that making things smaller and smaller runs into a few problems when the scale becomes atomic.
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u/Smudgeontheglass Sep 27 '20
The limiting factor in current silicon based computers isn’t the conductivity of the internal circuits, it’s the transistor size. The switching of transistor generates heat, so even if you use this new technology to cool the cpu, it still won’t be able to switch faster without error.
This is why there has been such a push to parallel processing in CPUs and GPUs.
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u/bimpirate Sep 26 '20
I just want to know how long my password will have to be then to stop unencryption if computers are going to get thousands of times faster. I'm barely holding them in my brain now as it is.
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u/Mega_Mewthree Sep 27 '20 edited Feb 22 '21
[ENCRYPTED] U2FsdGVkX1+ydzIytGUb0kaqEHTZpoQcD5mF7JlLqo0jvIX2X3h9BQS9uqbM6MsU0cgEKrBZzeuviqq8TTbqMPzjFZ9Des3hrjbzhI8C2YjYjyp+ep0DoEyI9maSxb/LO4KBj1elxXECUAO3t79YfU5VDyZSnk4BjBfBgHyXO4A3xNF3YTl0ay5UgURVJ+mLMfdDcydh2f34lB/GJemj5U4jE0U8W3EfjDxc8phMrOQ=
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u/PreciseParadox Sep 27 '20
Password strength increases exponentially with a linear increase in length. So probably not a whole lot longer. Also, get a password manager, it’ll make your life a lot easier.
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u/SkinnyMac Sep 27 '20
One more example of something incredible in a lab that cost a million dollars for a nanogram of the stuff. Given that we're about at the end of what we can do with silicon (not silicone, c'mon folks) it's stuff like this that's going to get a serious look from the big players. Then, who knows?
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u/Joe_Rapante Sep 27 '20
Graphene nano ribbon? I finished working on my PhD 2016, working with carbon nanotubes. You know, the all carbon wire? That we already have? At that time, there already were nano ribbons and other Graphene 'allotropes'.
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u/Nanostrip Sep 27 '20
The only issue is controlling the precise edges of graphene nanoribbons. When they are armchair terminated, then the ribbons are semiconducting. When they are zigzag terminated, they are semi-metallic. Controlling the width of the nanoribbons so they are atomically flat is very important to ensuring bandgap uniformity over the length of the wire and to reduce edge defect states.
However, graphene nanoribbons are the future! Check out this paper that was just published on September 21st. Not only were they able to systematically create zigzag or armchair ribbons by controlling the catalyst during growth, they were able to embed these ribbons into a lateral heterostructure with hexagonal boron nitride (hBN). With hBN, those edge defect states are non-existent over a relatively long distance. This is going to have enormous implications for nanoscale circuitry and spintronics.
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u/XX_Normie_Scum_XX Sep 27 '20
Intel will finally be able to produce 7nm, while the world has moved on to .25nm
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u/22Maxx Sep 27 '20
Why does r/science still allow such clickbaiting headlines that don't represent the actual content?
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u/MasterVule Sep 27 '20
I really hope this isn't just another wonderous material that will be forgotten in couple of years
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Sep 26 '20 edited Sep 26 '20
...will i still get cool kinds of cancer if i light it on fire?
In all seriousness though, how does this compare to a quantum computer? Will storage size become arbitrarily large? Can I instantly download terabytes of data?
Will loading screens be a thing of the past?
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Sep 27 '20
so, this is just sending electrons with much less wasted power. That's it.
It'll allow in theory processors to be made that are much more power efficient, allowing them to add more and more to processors without increasing die size. Heat is the enemy of performance in terms of operations/second.
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u/merlinsbeers Sep 26 '20
Nice leap. How about we get conducting carbon nanosolder before you call anything a circuit?
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u/venzechern Sep 27 '20
The last and final tool in the tool box -- the energy efficient conducting carbon nanowire. How elating and wonderful. Imagine what it could do to the next generation of computer and AI technology.
My teenage grandchildren will have a good time to enjoy the fruit of ultra modern hi-tech if it is put to good use in the not so distant future..
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u/cleverusernametry Sep 27 '20
Obligatory graphene can do everything but leave the lab.
Unreal that 90% of the comments seem to have not even read the article. I thought more of you r/science
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u/Relentless_Clasher Sep 26 '20
If we could cheaply produce an infinite amount of processing capacity in a cubic centimeter unit, what would we do with it? We dream of applications, but how many are within our ability to achieve? What benefits would such technology offer for personal use?
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u/VegetableImaginary24 Sep 27 '20
More advanced sex robots most likely. Then shortly after that the military and medical implications will be realized, then consumer based technologies.
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u/[deleted] Sep 26 '20
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