For more than 40 years, all our computers work with electronics on silicon has to spend 2000 transistors on a chip in 1971 to over six billion today! But the race to miniaturization may achieve by a decade, its limits dictated by the laws of physics. 22 nanometers today, etching microchips should go down to 16 nanometers in 2016 and finally to 5 nanometers to 2020, the equivalent of just fifty atoms put together!
But to reach this level of integration, electronics and IT will be faced with two formidable walls, one technological, the other economic. Scientists believe indeed it will be very difficult or impossible to get below the limit of 5 nm without radically changing technological approach because it succeeded in nano, electronics is dominated by the strange laws of physics Quantum.
In addition, many analysts point out that Moore's Law, which governs the progress of the computer for nearly half a century and plans to double the number of transistors on a chip every two years, will also be face the economic barrier of diminishing returns.
Specifically, when we reach 10 nm transistors, each reduction in the fine engraving of electronic circuits require technology and industrial investments increasingly significant to gain speed and efficiency less noticeable at consumer.
It is therefore absolutely necessary, for the reasons just indicated, the computer operates major technological breakthroughs over the next 10 years in order to prepare for the "post silicon" whose maturities approaching inexorably.
Among the technological avenues explored, those of carbon nanotubes and graphene are currently the most promising avenues of research, combined with quantum computing and photonics, to continue this endless race for power and miniaturization of computers.
It will be recalled that in October 2012, a team of IBM Research was successfully integrated 10,000 carbon nanotube transistors on a circuit with a new method using a substrate made of silicon and hafnium dioxide (HfO2) dipped in a solution of carbon nanotubes and detergent. By this technique, the researchers were able to produce two times smaller than those obtained with the subtleties of current engravings (see transistors IBM ).
There are six months, the team of Michael Hartmann (University of Munich), showed that it was possible to store information in nanotubes, as "qbits" quantum. The process developed by German researchers is to store information in the form of mechanical vibrations by using a carbon nanotube like a tiny guitar string whose two ends are clamped to produce vibrations (see TUM ).
The tube then vibrates more than a million times, because of its small size, allowing the information to be retained for a second. This information can then be read and written so optoelectronics. As Michael Hartmann: "We have opened a new and interesting way which could realize a quantum computer."
But this time, this is another milestone that has been reached: a team from Stanford University, California, is indeed succeeded in developing the first basic computer using carbon nanotubes. The machine, of only a few millimeters, is certainly very crude, but it opens a new promising (see Section Nature ).
Until now, the industrial production of carbon nanotubes designed to perform the functions of transistors was very difficult to control perfectly and about a third of metallic nanotubes were obtained, instead of semi-conductors, which did not allow them use as transistors capable of interrupting or otherwise to leave an electric current.
But the Stanford team, led by Philip Wong and Subhasish Mitra, has overcome this obstacle by removing the defective metal transistors using an electric current intensity.They were then able to produce complete sets of operating transistors made from carbon nanotubes.
Finally, these researchers conducted a processor computer consists of 178 transistors, each containing one hundred nanotubes. Although very simple, this chip is shown quite able to run an operating system and perform several types of parallel computing.
Commenting on this development, Professor Subhasish Mitra, who supervised this work emphasizes that "For the first time, we demonstrated that it was possible to produce on an industrial scale chips rather than silicon-based electronic components but carbon, which marks the beginning of a technological revolution. "
For now, the transistors of carbon nanotubes that have been tested in the laboratory have a much larger size of the micrometer (millionth of a meter) than their counterparts in silicon (20 nm for smaller ).
But as Adrian Ionescu, the Nanoelectronic Devices Laboratory of the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne said, "it took 40 years to silicon technology down to the fine print current of several tens of nanometers. The important thing is that we have demonstrated that it was possible to design and implement a computer using mainly components of carbon nanotubes. There are no major manufacturing carbon nanotube transistors as small and even smaller than silicon "barrier.
The substitution of silicon components with components made of carbon nanotubes also has other advantages: first, the amount of energy required to fail this type of transistors is much lower than that required by silicon transistors and secondly the carbon nanotubes have exceptional physical and chemical properties of heat dissipation and new electronics based on this type of component could thus largely overcome recurrent problems of ventilation and cooling capability of our computers and Current digital cameras (see MIT Technology Review ).
But until the arrival of the electronics of the future use of carbon nanotubes, scientists are exploring in parallel with other technology pathways, including that of silicon photonics seems particularly promising.
In February 2013, the CEA-Leti announced that it would coordinate a European project four years to accelerate the industrialization of this technology. The program, called PLAT4M (Libraries And Photonic Technology for Manufacturing) should allow rapid transfer of laboratory research to industrial production.
There a few weeks ago, a U.S. team composed of researchers from MIT and the firm Micron Technology, led by Milos Popovic, University of Colorado, has unveiled a microprocessor in which the electrons are more photons but under form of light rays, which ensure the flow of information between the various components (see University of Colorado Boulder ).
"This technological solution allows a flow of unrivaled information and requires very little energy. It is also portable and can be integrated without major difficulties in current industrial processes for the production of computer chips on silicon, "said Milos Popovic.
Around the world, many laboratories, including IBM and Intel, working on these photonic technologies and their integration or association conventional electronics. The optical interconnection is the use of a modulator which converts electric signals into optical signals, and a photodetector, which does the reverse.
It remains that in the future the increasing use of photonics also involves the abandonment of silicon and its replacement by other more efficient substrates such as germanium or, in the longer term, the graphene.
Dirk Englund, professor at MIT, said in this regard that, although graphene devices are still an order of magnitude behind the germanium in terms of ability to generate power in response to the absorption of light, they made tremendous progress over the past five years and will eventually prevail in these photonic technologies, given their exceptional electronic properties in terms of speed and frequency.
These recent studies show that these two promising technologies, electronic on carbon nanotubes and photonics may eventually converge to reach components and much more compact and fast computers today.
But another major technological breakthrough could be added to both technical advances and multiply potential:. Quantum computing In February 2013, researchers at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne have discovered that it was possible , using semiconductor nanowires, to create "quantum dots", stability and unprecedented efficiency. The properties of these new quantum structures are also configurable with high accuracy and can control unique photon emissions.
Finally, a few days ago, German physicists Friedrich Schiller University of Jena presented a prototype optical quantum computer chip based on the use of an optical circuit on a chip in the glass size of a palm. In this device, it is possible to process information using entangled photons, which come from the same source, whose quantum properties are correlated.
This shows that eventually will emerge a radically new computer that will combine three technological and conceptual revolutions: the first is the change of the substrate and the transition to nano materials from carbon. The second is characterized by the increased use of light photons, and in the production and the transmission of information. Finally, the third, which will use the full potential of the first two, for the control and use of strange quantum properties of matter, which will achieve computing power beyond imagining.
It is likely that the major technological and conceptual failures come true much faster than expected and converge to lead by ten years on a computer that has not much to do with the current and will probably compete in multiple domains with human intelligence.
It would be desirable, given the scientific challenge, cognitive and economic decisive is that this technological leap that Europe, as it was able to do in the area of the brain with the Human Brain Project, launched a major research program over 10 years to accelerate the advent of the computer of the future.
Originally published on RTflash This article is reproduced courtesy of Rene TRÉGOUËT, Honorary Senator and founder of Foresight Group of the Senate
