Max Shulaker of Stanford University is a member of a scientific team that successfully built a working computer using a foundation of cylinder-shaped molecules called nanotubes.
PALO ALTO, Calif. — A group of Stanford researchers has moved a step closer to answering the question of what happens when silicon, the standard material in today’s microelectronic circuits, reaches its fundamental limits for use in increasingly small transistors.
In a paper in the journal Nature on Wednesday, the researchers reported that they had successfully built a working computer — albeit an extremely simple one — entirely from transistors fashioned from carbon nanotubes. The nanotubes, which are cylinder-shaped molecules, have long held the promise of allowing smaller, faster and lower-powered computing, though they have proved difficult to work with.
The Stanford Robust Systems Group, however, has made significant progress in the last 18 months, advancing from building individual carbon nanotube transistors to simple electronic circuits made by interconnecting the transistors, and this week to a complete computer made from an ensemble of just 142 low-power transistors.
While Stanford’s prototype computer is assembled from transistors that are gargantuan by industry standards — one micron vs. 22 nanometers — it is what computer scientists refer to as a “Turing complete” machine, meaning that it is capable of performing any computation, given enough time.
“It can run two programs concurrently, a counting program and a sorting program,” said H.